ICE's Backdoor Into a Nationwide AI Surveillance Network

47m
This week is a bumper episode all about Flock, the automatic license plate reading (ALPR) cameras across the U.S. First, Jason explains how we found that ICE essentially has backdoor access to the network through local cops. After the break, Joseph tells us all about Nova, the planned product that Flock is making which will make the technology even more invasive by using hacked data. In the subscribers-only section, Emanuel details the massive changes AI platform Civitai has made, and why it's partly in response to our reporting.

YouTube version: https://youtu.be/-PTrY9x8K9c

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

License Plate Reader Company Flock Is Building a Massive People Lookup Tool, Leak Shows

Civitai Ban of Real People Content Deals Major Blow to the Nonconsensual AI Porn Ecosystem

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Transcript

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I'm your host, Joseph, and with me are all of the 404 Media co-founders, the first being Sam Cole.

Hey.

Emmanuel Mayberg.

Hello.

And Jason Kebler.

Hello.

Hello.

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 uh we have a tank top for order uh up for pre-sale on our shopify page um this is by

huge request lots of people actually emailed me asking for uh 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

design.

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.

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.

It looks good.

It looks good on the tank top.

It looks fantastic.

So check it out.

Yeah.

They put Doom on a shirt.

That's good.

And it's open source, as you said.

So

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 Ages, really, really good game.

See, now they can't be mad at us.

Or for me, it endorses the Dark Ages.

Yeah.

We don't usually do endorsements, but that's like the one we're probably going to do.

All right.

uh emmanuel do you want to take this first story yeah so our first story is from jason and joe the headline is ice taps into nationwide ai enabled camera net camera network data shows uh 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

yeah so flock is an automated license plate reader camera um 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 one that's used by different homeowners associations and neighborhood watch groups.

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.

The AI of it, is that the ability to find and identify the license plates?

Is that the AI portion of it?

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.

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 chat GPT, but it is AI or machine learning, I guess, you know.

So, what is this data that we got?

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

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 FLOC, 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 six 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 Flox network.

It says the,

it shows like how many devices were searched.

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, this just says like stolen car, property theft, things like that.

But for a lot of them, for between 4,000 and 5,000 of them,

it says immigration, or it will say HSI, which is Homeland Security Investigations.

which is division of FLOC, or sorry, it's 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 FLOC cameras to do immigration enforcement, and crucially, they were doing it on behalf of the Department of Homeland Security, HSI, and also ICE.

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 ATT 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?

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 are like.

taking bids and they're purchasing the software and 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's system without paying for it.

Uh, I say backdoor or 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 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.

So

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 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

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 blues 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 287G, 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 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

you know, pick up people for ICE, but also that

this surveillance network has been built.

This like apparatus has been built largely by going community to community and saying like, 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 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 it someone on our force did that search, but we don't like exactly know why.

So, what can you talk about?

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?

Like, what are the responses to that contradiction?

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 like 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, quote, immigration violation or something like that.

And they'll be like, oh, 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 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 the 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

important.

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

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 it,

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.

But cops were like pitching Ring to communities.

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 like, 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 concerns with Ring, security concerns with 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?

Cars that specific people own.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

that'll go directly into Joseph's next story.

But

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

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 DFLOC that is trying to track where these are.

And if you look at that, you'll see they're in a lot of like every mid-sized city, tons of suburbs, lots of big cities.

They're in many, many, many US cities.

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.

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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 leads on to some of the things we were talking about in the first 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?

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 page about Nova, and it says you can quote, see the full story, connect people, vehicles, and locations across agencies.

Nova helps you solve crime and prevents the next one faster.

And it's supposed to bring all of your agency's data in one place, you know, 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

what 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

yeah so I actually

was the Nova page up by the time we did this article It was.

I'm not sure if we actually quoted it explicitly.

Maybe we did in the earlier draft.

Well, there's still nothing about it, as you said like what what the act what a next-gen public safety data platform actually is wasn't known and so you you know had had a source who leaked you information about what it is uh actually some information from within flock and 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 uh what what so what is this product yeah so as you say the marketing material is really 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've actually used Park Mobile, right, Jason?

What is it?

ParkMobile is a smartphone app that you use to park mobile off your mobile device.

No, so

a lot of states, a lot of cities have replaced their parking meters with ParkMobile.

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.

Uh, it's extremely common, it's very, very, very common.

I see it all the time as a driver.

And when you sign up, you presumably have to tell them about your car, right?

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.

Right, which is all information, which is very, very interesting, very, very interesting to flock, right?

So I want to highlight here, you just said it, but this is hacked data, hacked data from ParkMobile.

It's like they flock didn't go and buy this from ParkMobile, did they?

From what we can tell,

I'm not 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 Park Mobile.

That data includes people's email addresses, phone numbers, um, 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 tool could 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 registered to and that sort of thing.

But this is allowing

Flock Nova users to do it basically

instantaneously, at least.

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.

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, you know, 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 SpyCloud.

And they would have breached passwords and all of that sort of thing.

And then they were selling access 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.

Right.

So, what else is in here, though?

Because it's not just ParkMobile, it's other things too.

Yeah, there's two other main types.

And one is, quote, commercially available data, end quote, 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?

But 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, etc.

And sometimes they then rebundle that and then sell that or transfer that to other people.

One example is

TransUnion's tool T-L-O-X-P, which it sells 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.

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 know, you had, I believe it was leaked Slack messages.

That's right, isn't it?

Yeah.

What were people inside Flock saying about this?

Sure, yeah.

It was leaked Slacks and there was also audio of a meeting.

And

this meeting, I think, was very, very telling because it really crystallized what Flock imagines this product

could be.

And 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, you know, 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 quote 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 um and that is the entire um thinking behind this uh behind this tool and then in some of the slack chats i don't think i go into them in 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 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, it's just wild that a company is taking hacked information in the first place at all.

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 really like.

It's really making this network much more powerful, I believe.

So, so, I mean, is this more invasive than just having ALPR data on its own?

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 actually heard that complaint.

So,

do people actually say that to us, Jason?

do people write on

i mean i see it i see it a lot on social media okay 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 right 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 um

outlets as well 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 just

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 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,

you know, car culture is bad, et cetera.

But it's like people have cars because they like 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.

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 by federal law enforcement and private investigators and they looked up with consent

a specific person and like it maps 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.

You know, 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.

Yeah.

All right.

Should we leave it there?

And I'll give it back to you to read the, that, to say the end parts, because I don't remember what they are.

Of course.

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