The Matt Walsh Show - Ep. 1808 - What's Going On With Flock Cameras? We Did A Deep Dive

Episode Date: July 21, 2026

The internet has been freaking out over the Flock surveillance cameras. I looked into these controversial cameras, and here's what I found. Ep. 1808 - - - Today's Sponsors: Boll & Branch - Sleep cooler this summer with Boll & Branch. Get 15% off your first order plus free shipping at https://BollAndBranch.com/walsh with code WALSH.  PureTalk - Any plan for $15 a month. This promotion isn't going to last very long. Go to https://PureTalk.com/WALSH to make the switch to PureTalk. - - - Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dwplus.watch/MattWalshMemberExclusive - - - DailyWire+ 🎆 🇺🇸 Our America 250 SALE is still available! Get 3-Months of DailyWire+ for just $17.76 📜 Become a Daily Wire Member and watch all of our content ad-free: https://dwplus.watch/RealHistorySubscribe 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📜 Real History with Matt Walsh is available ad-free, exclusively on DailyWire+ https://dwplus.watch/RealHistory 👕 Get your Matt Walsh flannel here: https://dwplus.shop/MattWalshMerch - - - Socials:  YouTube — https://youtube.com/@mattwalsh Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/mattwalshblog Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/mattwalshblog TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@mattwalsh_ X — https://twitter.com/mattwalshblog - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free under 20 minutes. You'll get a straight answer, which is more than Medicare has ever given you. Visit dailywire.com slash chapter today. Maybe you've heard of the horseshoe theory, which was coined, I think back in the dark ages, by a wise man who realized that all of his podcast were starting to sound the same. And the idea is that at the extreme ends of the spectrum, the right and the left are pretty much indistinguishable. That's the idea of the horseshoe.

And under this theory, whether they're on the right of the left, political activists, quote, have a tendency to see politics in unambiguous terms, distrust authorities and elites, and have intense hostility towards those who hold other views. Now, whatever you make of the theory itself, there's no question that the left and the right are now finding a lot more common ground than usual. And that's notable because as they've openly admitted many times, the left is committed to the destruction of Western civilization and the rule of law. I mean, you'd think it would be very difficult for anyone to find agreement with these people. But increasingly, that's not the case. Communists have found very unlikely allies in the conservative

movement on a handful of issues, on an increasing number of issues. First, of course, there was the AI data center debate, which we've discussed before. On both the right and the left, there's a consensus that these data centers are going to poison the water, prevent anyone from sleeping, usher in the apocalypse, and take everybody's job, among other things. And while there are very real issues with data centers, which we've talked about, the debate surrounding the issue has become a complete mess to send it into hysteria. Now, whenever there's a bipartisan consensus, that's the typical result. People tend to work. themselves into hysterics when they're in echo chamber because they just keep ratcheting up the paranoia

and the panic. The end result is that nobody can have a serious discussion. Anyone who tries to provide a dissenting opinion, gets shouted down, and ultimately perversely, that works for the benefit of the bad guys or alleged bad guys. If you're running a data center and you want to do something nefarious with it, it's very good news if all your critics start sounding like lunatics. People who sound crazy are easy to discredit and dismiss. We're seeing a similar trajectory play out with the debate over flock cameras, which at this point you've probably heard about. People are talking about flock cameras on podcasts and local news reports and cable news and social media. We're talking about flock cameras on next door.

In case you haven't heard about them, though, flock cameras are just to basically summarize, our AI-enabled surveillance cameras that scan license plates and log other information about vehicles, which are then used by law enforcement to track people with outstanding warrants or, you know, they're used in the case of Amber alerts or a missing person, and so on. And there are now tens of thousands of these cameras all over the country. Soon there will be hundreds of thousands if there aren't already. And no matter who you ask about this, you'll hear the same thing, that these cameras are supposedly making 1984 real. They're ushering in a vast surveillance state in which no human connection or interaction is possible and in which innocent people are stocked and harassed

everywhere they go. And most of the people making this argument are using their cell phones to do so without a hint of irony. They're logging on to social media platforms which exist to sell your personal information and complaining about the surveillance state. They're using cellular networks that are constantly surveilled by a major corporation as well as the NSA. And after telling the NSA exactly where they are, and after informing Facebook and next door and Instagram of all their personal information, these people are alerting the public to the danger of the surveillance state, and specifically the danger that's posed by flock cameras. Now, before we begin, I am not a supporter of mass surveillance in general, obviously. Flock, as we will discuss,

has a lot of problems. But these problems are not a license to lie about flock or about any other issue. They're not an excuse to spread false information or make posts that are deliberately misleading. And that's what we're seeing. You know, it's gone on far too long and it needs to for example. Here's a report from the official news channel of the Democrat Party, MS Now, where every anchor is apparently contractually obligated to look as much like Rachel Maddow as possible. Watch. So I hate to tell you, but you might be getting flocked as in F-L-O-C-E-D. Flocked.

Across the country, there is a new kind of surveillance taking place. It is an estimated 100,000 cameras recording cars, where they go, what they look like, when they pass by. All of this is creating searchable records of everyday Americans' movements. It is what happens when you get flocked. It is a reference to flock safety, the largest provider of automatic license plate readers in the United States. These plate readers are pretty unassuming.

They're often attached to utility poles like that and streetlights that line highways and neighborhoods and parking lots. And supporters say that those plate readers help solve crimes by giving investigators leads they might not otherwise have. But you don't have to be suspected of a crime or really do anything at all to end up being in the database. You simply just drive by it. And as you might imagine, concerns about privacy and whether flock cameras actually work are starting to pile up. Can anybody in this room tell me do flock cameras? stop crime. Okay? Y'all wasting money, man. A million dollars on that? That's trance. I trust our police. I don't trust lock. No more automated license plate readers of any brand.

This technology is anti-democratic. Just so you all know, I am a right-wing MAGA Republican voter. I'm telling you all this, so y'all grasp how this issue spans across this political spectrum. An AI surveillance apparatus goes against the very essence of freedom and the core values of our country. We didn't vote for this and we sure as hell don't want it, so do us a favor and get it the flock out of here. That anchor was so impressed with himself for that flock pun. He was so impressed, even though he didn't even write it, but I hate to tell you, but you're getting flocked. Get it? No, you thought I said the F-word, but I said flock.

F-L-O-C-K. You get the joke, do you? Now, no matter what you think about flock cameras, even if you think they should all be banned immediately. There's something you need to know and notice about segments like this. Every single investigative segment into flock cameras does the same thing. They all brush past the idea that these cameras could possibly be useful in solving crime. As you just heard, the guy in the town hall meeting implies that these cameras don't stop crime at all.

And the anchor barely mentions the idea that cameras could be useful. He simply said that supporters say they solve crime, before immediately talking about the privacy issue. That's a pretty obvious sign that you're being manipulated. If we're going to talk about the issues with flock cameras, and we should talk about them, and we will, we have to tell the whole story, not just part of it. Again, this is not going to be a pro-flock monologue,

but it's also not going to be the same slop that insults your intelligence, which you've probably heard dozens of times now. So let's begin with a few real-life cases in which flock cameras have been directly, involved in criminal investigations. There's no better way to learn what these cameras are capable of and how they're useful or not useful as the case may be. Because as in fact, they are used to solve crimes. That's a real thing.

So you can't just stay in there and say, well, you think that these are used to solve crimes? Ridiculous. Waving your hand at it doesn't mean, like, of course they're used to solve crimes. It's a real thing. So we'll start with a murder that took place on April 13, 2024 at Wilbur Young Park and Blue Spring. Missouri. There was a fist fight and then a shooting around 1030 p.m. dozens of shell cases were discovered at the scene and authorities determined that at least three people had fired shots.

Three people were hit and two were killed. Now, first thing the police did was check the city-owned cameras that were nearby. These are dumb cameras that are not connected to flock system. The cameras revealed that a man later identified as Marquis Earl Lee Savannah, raced to a car shortly after the shooting. But the footage was grainy. It didn't. capture the license plate of the car. All the camera showed was that the car was a Chevy cruise with a specific color and configuration. And that information ordinarily would not narrow down the search very much. Then the authorities turn to the city's flock cameras, which work differently. They aren't simply license plate readers. Flock cameras track dozens of individual

characteristics of cars from color to bumper stickers to dents. And this is one of the core features of the product, which they call free form. A police officer can type in the flock system that he's looking for a gray pickup truck with tinted windows and a bumper sticker that says no border wall, and the system will find it. They can use AI in ways that would have been unthinkable just 10 years ago or even five years ago to sift through thousands of videos and identify a precise match. Now, Flock's relevant patent specifically covers a, quote, system and method for object-based query of video content captured by a dynamic surveillance network, which allows them to parse videos for content and keep it in a database and connection with data that identifies the content,

object class aspects of the object, confidence scores, timing, location data, etc. As reported by footnote 4A, quote, the patent family extends to neural networks trained to identify clothing, estimate height and weight, and classify other physical characteristics of individuals stored by design in searchable databases. That is an index that is being built continuously by design and is queryable by any user a flock decides gets a search box. Now all this to say, even without a license plate, flock cameras can track down a specific Chevy Cruise,

and that's exactly what happened in this case. This is from the local Fox affiliate quote. According to court documents, a sergeant used the flock camera system to identify the sedan shown in the park camera as a specific color, year, make, and model bearing a specific license plate. Two days later, another sergeant received a flock hit on the Chevy Cruise. Patrol Sergeant then responded

to the area to look for it, spotted that a car wash nearby, and took the driver into custody. Flowers said the department has had the network for about a year. Super helpful. We use it constantly during our investigations. Flowers said investigators could track a vehicle back in time for up to 30 days with a hotspot map showing areas where it appears frequently. Authorities said this can be used to determine where a suspect may live.

Now, this kind of investigation happens all the time with flock. Here's another example in the summer of 2024 at the Cherry Creek Shopping Center in Denver, a gang of South American thieves stole more than $12 million in jewelry. And according to authorities, four people traveled from California to Denver and a dark-colored pickup truck without any license plates. They were dressed like construction workers, they had hard hats, masks, gloves, reflexive vests, as you can see here. They arrived at the mall around 8 p.m.,

at which point they began cutting through a wall from a shop next to the jewelry store before breaking into display cases and store saves. They were in the store for a total of eight hours, and about three hours into the theft, they tripped an alarm. But when mall security looked at the cameras, they assumed that it was related to construction job. And so the gang went all over the country in this way, carrying out similar heists as far away as New Jersey.

They were proving extremely difficult to catch because, again, their truck didn't have a license plate and the criminals were all wearing masks. Once they were gone, police had no description to work with. The investigation only turned a corner once the authorities began using flock cameras. This is from CBS News, quote, shortly after the Denver heist, investigators fed information about the truck into a database belonging to flock systems. The company that has installed license plate reader cameras in Colorado and across the country, as it turns out, the system does more than help track vehicles through their license plates.

It's essentially machine learning technology, a kind of artificial intelligence, said Holly Baylon, a spokesperson for flock safety, by inputting the type of vehicle body, style color and number of other characteristics of the truck into the flock system, it told investigators that the precise truck had been seen by another camera on Interstate 70 in Glenwood Springs headed toward Denver before the heist. At that time, the truck displayed California license plates. So that was a major break in the case. The flock cameras tracked pickup truck a long way back based on its physical characteristics. And with the help of flock's patented AI, in this case, the authorities learned that the truck involved in the

jeweler heist was displaying a California plate at one point along Interstate 70. And meanwhile, the authorities obtained a search warrant for the cell phone tower at the shopping center. They found that a phone belonging to an illegal alien named Gustavo Salas Ortega was active at the mall during the heist. And by itself, that's not a smoking gun because there's plenty of reasons why somebody might be around the mall late at night, arguably. But in this case, the information was damning because the same cell phone also pinged. the tower along Interstate 70 at the precise moment, the flock cameras were capturing the pickup truck. So in other words, because of the flock cameras in conjunction with cell phone data,

authorities developed probable cause that Gustavus Salas Ortega was involved in the robbery. He wasn't simply at the mall during the robbery. He was also driving a truck that arrived right before the robbery carrying construction workers and left once the robbery was concluded. Again, whatever you think of flock cameras or the privacy implications in these cases, the flock cameras were clearly useful. Not just useful, they were pivotal in solving a serious crime. There's no getting around that. It is a good thing unambiguously for murderers and illegal alien jewelry thieves to be in prison. We need to remove these people from society and the cameras allow the authorities to do that. So it can't be as simple. If we have technology that would help us solve crimes like this,

it cannot be as simple as just to say, well, we just shouldn't use it. We should be more sporting. You know, we should be good sports. Yeah, we could solve these crimes, but it'd be better to have these murderers running free. That seems like a wildly overly simplistic take on this issue. And there's a reason that no one in MSNOW or on your favorite conspiracy podcast wants to talk about these cases. It's a lot easier to get clicks by telling people that Big Brother is watching them and that they need to panic.

could ride in the streets about it. But the reality is just a lot more complicated. And there are plenty of other cases I could talk about just a couple of weeks ago in Porter County, Indiana. A flock camera alerted police to a stolen U-Haul on the highway. They pulled it over, arrested the driver, and returned the vehicle. Again, it's clearly a positive outcome. Last year, Flot cameras tracked down a man who shot a police officer in Oklahoma. The cameras traced his vehicle to New Mexico. The cameras identified his license plate in a Walmart parking lot. police swarmed the area. The guy then shot himself. This is clearly a violent and dangerous person, and because of these cameras,

the police got to him before he could shoot anyone else, except himself, which, you know, well, that's his choice. Makes things easier in a lot of ways. Then there was the carjacking that took place a couple of months ago in Oakland County, Michigan, in which a man shot a woman in a mall parking lot and took her car. The police department used flock cameras to find the car and arrest the carjacker in a little over an hour. There was also the 60-year-old man in Indiana who was arrested near a park for sexual battery on a juvenile after flock cameras found his car. That seems like a positive outcome. And here's another example from Iowa a few months ago.

Last Tuesday, one person was shot and another assaulted here at Nicholson Ford Park. Marshalltown Police were later able to arrest a suspect thanks to a piece of technology. The technology is extremely beneficial for us. The two victims who were at Nicholson Ford Park, along with witnesses, gave us. authorities a description of the vehicle. We really didn't have a whole lot to go off right away, short of a vehicle description. So we were able to use our flock cameras. Captain Kyle Stevenson with Marshalltown police says one of the flock cameras helped authorities zero in on a vehicle the day of the incident. It was kind of a unique vehicle description. And we're able to use the cameras to

find that vehicle and identify the vehicle and then ultimately the occupants of the vehicle. And here's one more. This is from the Brown University mass shooting that you probably remember from the end of last year, a random homeless guy reported a suspicious vehicle on Reddit and told police that it was probably related to the shooting. They tracked the car retroactively and learned that it had been spotted 14 times by flock cameras in the two weeks before the shooting watch. Now, a case that gripped the nation can be seen as the latest success story for flock cameras. Much of the Northeast was on edge after two people died and many others were injured in a mass shooting at Brown University. Police then connected the gunman on the loose.

to the murder of an MIT professor, more fear and concern out of the community. After several days, investigators got their breakthrough tip, a lead on the car driven by the gunman. According to an Associated Press report, police used the 70 flock cameras in Providence, Rhode Island, to retroactively track the movement of the suspect's Nissan sedan. That trail helped lead them to a storage facility in New Hampshire where police found the suspect dead. His motive? Still unknown. Now we can spend the next few weeks talking about cases like this, but you get the point. These are verifiable. These are true stories in which flock cameras clearly assisted the authorities in tracking some very dangerous people.

These cameras have saved lives as a result. There's no question about it. You know, summer has a way of turning bedtime into a negotiation. You start with the blanket on five minutes later. It's on the floor. Then you lower the thermostat another three degrees. And hope for the best. The problem isn't always a temperature.

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we have to talk about the benefits that are clearly being realized because of the cameras. You can't weigh the pros and cons of the cameras, and you can't talk about the trade-offs if you simply refuse to discuss stories like this. Now, if you ignore all this evidence and simply conclude that anybody who supports flock cameras must be a corporate chill or a Fed or whatever retarded nonsense, then you're not worth taking seriously. I mean, I could just as easily say that you're on the side of the foreign invaders and the leftist NGO allies who despise flock cameras because they're being used to enforce immigration law,

which, by the way, is one of the main reasons why the left doesn't like them. That's what they're really upset about, if we're actually being honest. People who enforce COVID lockdowns don't actually care about your privacy. Their sole objective for some time now has been to flood this country with criminals, particularly foreign criminals, but really any criminal that they can take, that they'll take them all, in order to enact demographic replacement. They've turned California into a colony of Mexico that will never again elect another Republican and they want to do the same thing to the rest of the country.

Flock cameras stand in the way, which is why they oppose them. It's that simple. Let's go back to that MS Now segment to give you an idea. So don't take it from me. Listen to their objections. And now the fight over flock has moved onto college campuses. At least 75 campuses have these cameras. Places that my next guest, Bullwork journalist Adrian Kadaskio, says, are the next

frontier of the deportation wars. But there are students who are pushing back. The Bullwark reports that groups are organizing against the use of plate readers with the goal to quote C-Flock no longer deployed on campuses at all. And joining me now to discuss it all is Adrian Keraskio, National Immigration Correspondent of the Bullwork and Tobias Halpern, student of California, Polytechnic State University and founder of D. Flock, SLO, A.K.A.A.S. Let me start with you. Thanks to both of you for being here. Tell me more about what you guys are doing at

deflox slow. And, you know, why of all the issues on a college campus, was this so important to you? Yeah, I mean, so we're in a unique, unique institution where San Luis Obispo and Cal Poly claims to be a Hispanic serving institution. And as you started to bring up, the ice connection was just too big to ignore. When you opt into flock, when you buy a flock camera like Cal Poly did, you don't just buy a surveillance camera, you're buying access and participation into this network. And so I think that's what really bothers people and that's what really bothers students. And that's what bothered us at Cal Poly is that as a Hispanic serving institution, they are going out and entering this network that has time and time again aided ICE in illegal deportations

and just created this surveillance drag net that is really uncomfortable to anyone when you think about it. So MS now brings on two guests, both of them opposed to flock, and both of them spend the entire time talking about ICE and immigration enforcement. And one of them is literally an immigration reporter. The other is some kid who's concerned about illegal deportations, by which he means deportations. Of course, all deportations are illegal to these people. This is not an accident. This is their entire focus.

The kid's not worried about flock cameras somehow being used to frame him for a crime or record him in his home or any of the horror stories you might hear about. He's concerned that flock cameras will be used to identify and deport Democrat Party vogue. voters. That's where the left's opposition to flock cameras comes from. Similar to why they hate ring cameras. It's why they elect DAs who open the prisons. They want criminals to get away with crimes. It's really no more complicated than that. So if you're on the right, if you want to preserve Western civilization, which means preserving law and order and national identity, you're making common cause with these people. It doesn't necessarily mean you're wrong, but it should give you some pause. It should make you scrutinize very carefully why you oppose

flock cameras and what you know about them. So let's do that. Now the arguments against flock cameras break down into two categories, hypothetical problems and actual problems, meaning cases where flock has been misused beyond any doubt. Professor Wilford Riley offers this example of a hypothetical problem with flock cameras. He says, quote, it's just objectively is bad if you scuffle with a bum for 45 seconds to protect your girl, make out with that same lady against the wall outside of nightclub, or drive 25 miles over the speed limit anywhere. A robot can fly to your house. and charge you with two A misdemeanors. This is especially the case, given that, one, only taxpayers with addresses can get targeted

in this fashion, and two, this will immediately get political in both directions. Now, this is a scenario that we should say, for the record, has never taken place. As far as I know, nothing like this has actually ever occurred. And for good measure, we'll include Peter Hassan's reply to that post. He's at the free beacon. He says, quote, I'm sorry, but the flock discussions are so deranged. Flock is basically a tool to make it easier to catch gangbangers after drive-by shootings, which is why Libs hate it, and you have people on the right making up fake scenarios and then

getting mad about them. Very stupid own goals. Now, as you'd imagine, Peter was dogpiled for that post, including by people on the right. It's not an easy position to stake out. A lot of people replied to him by making the argument that under a future Democrat administration, you could imagine Riley's scenario happening for real. During the next fake pandemic, you could easily picture Gavin Newsom's administration shutting down the roads and arresting any homeowner in a right-wing neighborhood who ventures outside. And just as easily you could imagine Gavin Newsom's administration allowing foreigners and felons like George Floyd to roam the streets with total impunity. This is the anarcho-tirony objection to flock cameras, which Mike Cernovich has made very forcefully.

The idea is that if the rule of law existed in this country, then flock cameras would be fine. But we all saw how the FBI ruthlessly hunted down January 6th grandmothers, while at the same time they ignored BLM rioters who committed murder and destroyed small businesses all over the country. We saw how the public health experts so-called said we couldn't protest the lockdowns because it was too dangerous, but at the same time, BLM had every right to terrorize entire neighborhoods because white supremacy was supposedly an even bigger problem than COVID. So what guarantees do we have that flock cameras won't be used in the exact same way to punish the enemies of the Democrat Party? Well, the answer, of course, is that we have no guarantees whatsoever. I mean, it's conceivable

that if communists take control of the government, again, they'll use these cameras to crack down on free expression. They'll track us everywhere we go. They'll make sure we aren't going to, you know, go to any unapproved gatherings or visit any enemies of the state. They'll make 1984 real, and we'll have to endure another 50 years of listening to cliched references to that particular book. And as alarming as that hypothetical is, we have to keep a few things in mind. First of all, AI-powered devices are already tracking us everywhere we go. They're called cell phones. And unlike flock cameras, which mainly track vehicles, cell phones are usually in your pocket. You know, they log every single one of your movements going back years. And I'm not just talking about

Google services like Google Maps, which record your location in the background. I'm talking about the cell phone signal itself, even when you're not using the phone. Just to give you an idea of how precise this tracking is. Remember the lunatic who ambushed those firefighters in Idaho last summer? He lit a brush fire on the west slope of Canfield Mountain. And then when the firefighters showed up, he retreated to the woods and opened fire. Now, the SWAT team had no idea where the shooter was. So they spent several hours slowly driving up to the scene of the shooting in an armored bearcat, trying to find where the sniper had gone. They didn't want to get out and look because they were worried they'd get shot. And they sent up thermal drones, but they weren't returning any heat signatures.

So what did they do? Well, they got a court order requiring a cell phone company to provide information about any cell phones in the area. And while they had a tentative match with somebody in the woods, the data wasn't specific enough to pinpoint the suspect's exact location. So the FBI flew a helicopter overhead equipped with digital receiver technology, which is basically a cell site simulator. It mimics a cell tower, and cell phones automatically attempt to connect to it. That's how they located the precise location of the shooter within a margin of inches. Okay. So in other words, if you have a cell phone, then you can't hide from anyone. If you have a cell phone, then the scenario you're worried about with flock cameras is already happening. Google, Apple, and the cell phone carriers already know everything about you, including where you are every second of the day. They're all selling that information. And even if they weren't, the FBI has equipment that can locate precisely where your cell phone is at any moment in time. So if you're opposed to flock cameras, then it doesn't make any sense to also, you know,

have no problem with the cell phone. There's no getting around it. But even if you successfully lobby to get flock cameras banned nationwide, and even if you throw away your phone, you're still going to be tracked by cameras 99% of the time. First of all, pretty much every residential neighborhood is now flooded with ring cameras. If you go for a walk in a typical suburb,

there's a very good chance that ring cameras can easily piece together your entire route and listen to your conversations. Many of these cameras have enough range to see the street so they can track vehicles. Also, now, it's true that ring cameras are technically more decentralized than flock cameras since flock cameras are leased to law enforcement agencies but owned and maintained by flock, while ring cameras are owned by millions of individuals, homeowners and business owners. But in practice, it's not much of a distinction. Ring like flock maintains all the footage on its servers.

during an investigation, police can easily obtain a search warrant for all of that footage without asking individual homeowners for permission. So if you want to ban flock cameras, then to achieve any kind of meaningful result, you really have to ban ring cameras too. And that would obviously be a disaster for about a dozen reasons. First of all, people have the right to install cameras on their own property if they want to. That's their right. Secondly, ring cameras capture all kinds of criminal activity every single day.

If you've ever used the Ring app, you know that people are constantly posting videos of crimes. They're also posting thousands of comments about missing dogs and lost mail, which you need to filter out before you go insane. But third, as a journalist, Cam Higby pointed out, once you start banning private people from using cameras, you're basically making it illegal to be a journalist. A real journalist, anyway. Cam Higby has shot some extremely important footage over the past few years. We feature his coverage on the show many times. He's one of the few people who's willing to risk his life to cover Antifa violence, for example. But if we're going to ban private surveillance, then we have to ban journalists like Cam Higby, too. Now, of course, none of the opponents of flock will go that far.

When you drill down, they'll say that they're really opposed to flock because there are specific concrete issues with this specific surveillance system, not cameras in general. That's where the actual debate lies. At least that's what the rational critics will say. So let's focus on that debate, on the rational debate, as opposed to the hypotheticals and the grand sweeping paranoia about a surveillance state that has already been in place for a really long time and you're already participating in every single day when you walk around with your cell phone. The first substantive argument against flock, one you may have seen, is that they supposedly spied on children. So here's one viral post, for example, that has millions of views.

Quote, a flock vice president logged into the Dunwoody PD's flock system and looked at a camera in the children's gymnastics room of a private community center here in Dunwoody. He did not look at any other cameras in the entire 400 camera network that day. Now, the way that's written it obviously sounds like the flock vice president is a pervert who belongs in prison. And indeed, you'll find thousands of comments accusing the VP by name of being a pedophile. Now, what this post omits is that according to flock, their vice president was running a sales demo of the system when he pulled up to feed. He wasn't specifically trying to pull up the gymnastics center for the purpose of looking at children.

Instead, they say he was trying to demonstrate how the system safeguards work. So, for example, if you try to search for Star of David so that you can round up all the Jews, it will deny the request. Now, if you try to enter someone's specific name, it will deny the request. It's only supposed to pull up videos that match general descriptions like black pickup truck, you know, or something like that. Now, is Flock's story excuse true? We don't know, but it's also true.

that we have no actual evidence of Flock's VP is a pedophile. The VP knows that all of these searches are stored, which is how they were eventually released to the public. So it certainly would be odd for him to pull up this footage one day, knowing that anyone could submit a records request and discover the search. If you're going to accuse a man of one of the most serious crimes imaginable, you need some evidence. There's none here at all. But even assuming their story is true, does that mean that flock bears no responsibility here? Well, of course not. They've admitted this was wrong and that flock cameras that are installed in sensitive locations shouldn't be a part of any sales demo. The only reason flock should have been looking at this gymnastics center is if

there was an emergency and somebody was trying to harm these children. Like what happened at that Taylor Swift dance studio in the UK when the foreigner whose family was imported from Rwanda massacred several children. So for example, that would be a valid occasion to use the cameras. And you can see the mugshot of that guy here, by the way. the guy who looks like he's been struck by lightning every day of his life, these people exist. And flock is supposed to assist in tracking them. That was their deal with the gymnastics center when they installed the equipment and they broke the deal by accessing the footage for no reason.

But this is the perfect illustration of what I'm talking about. By making this about pedophilia, critics of flock are discrediting themselves for no reason. There's no evidence that flocks vice president is a pervert. But that's the claim flocks detractors are making with total confidence, instead of focusing on the actual issue, which there is one, they're just making something up. It's counterproductive. It's also extremely dumb. And we see it all the time. Now, another argument you'll hear, which is a better argument, is that flocks tracking is so pervasive and so extensive that it's the equivalent of a specific police officer following you around all day when you're in your car. This is the kind of surveillance

that under our existing law may be a violation of your Fourth Amendment rights. It's true that anybody, including police officers, has the constitutional right to observe you in public. You don't any expectation of privacy when you're driving in your car, people are free to observe you on the road. But it's also true that if somebody follows you around all the time, everywhere you go, then they're crossing a line into stalking and harassment. And the argument is that by tracking people for hundreds of miles, flock cameras are basically acting as stalkers. They're the equivalent of police officers who are harassing you, following you around. Now, you can think of a few ways to address this concern. One solution will be to prevent anyone at flock or local

police department from viewing any footage without explicit or authorization from a court. That's already the expectation, but it's often violated. Flocked footage is routinely being accessed without any justification. Watch. A police officer who used license plate reader cameras to track down a woman and wrongly accuse her of theft will be disciplined. This story has been spreading online over the last month. Sergeant Jamie Milliman with the Columbine Valley Police Department showed up to a woman's home and claimed he had video evidence proving she stole a package. Milliman used the flock safety cameras to track her down. Turns out the allegation was wrong. The woman ended up proving she wasn't the theft,

the thief, and providing her own video evidence, the town administrator with Columbine Valley wrote that Officer Milliman will be disciplined, but won't elaborate beyond that. And now former Georgia Sheriff's employees facing charges accused of using license plate data to stock two people. And the GBI is now investigating. Investigators say Anna Altebello, a secretary at the Eccles County Sheriff's Office, searched the flock safety system on multiple occasions for two people she knew personally. The GBI says the searches were unrelated to any law enforcement activity. And unfortunately, this isn't the first time that law enforcement has been accused of misusing

flock safety data. Back in October, Sandy Springs Police said that they had to fire a reserve officer for refusing to cooperate in an investigation into possible misconduct related to the system. These are cases you'll hear about a lot when you're listening to the anti-flock side of the argument. They'll point to the fact that technology has been abused. And there are many more cases like this. There's CBS Atlanta with a recap. Quote, Cherokee County, three sheriff's employees, including a lieutenant and sergeant,

were arrested after investigators alleged they improperly searched the county's license plate reader database. Albany. Five former Albany police officers were arrested after a Georgia Bureau investigation probe found they allegedly used flock data for unauthorized purposes following an internal audit. Green County, a sheriff's deputy, was arrested and fired after investigator said an audit showed she used the flock system for personal reasons. Fayetteville, three police officers were fired this week after investigators say they searched license plates belonging to themselves, family members, and acquaintances without a legitimate

law enforcement purpose. Meanwhile, reason put out this video where a sassy reporter outlines a few more egregious cases, watch. 20 times in one month. the Arkansas couple that had a FLOT camera pointed right at their house putting them and their guests under constant warrantless surveillance. And not to perpetuate stereotypes, but multiple cops and police chiefs have accessed FLOC hundreds of times to stock their exes and current partners. But don't worry, you can stock people too, because FLOT cameras are hackable in under 30 seconds. They can be

turned into a personal spy device, run on an Android operating system discontinued in 2021, and didn't even have two-factor authentication until it recently came out that they didn't. YouTube or Ben Jordan even found 51 vulnerabilities with Flock and said accessing them is so easy, 12-year-olds could do it. We don't condone the destruction of Flock cameras, but we're also not surprised the public has reached their boiling point. One Virginia man now faces 19 felonies and six misdemeanors for destroying 13 cameras over six months. I hate the editing on these. I hate the way these videos are edited now. Every video now.

In particular, any, any, any video where it's, any video where it's, a woman talking to a camera now. It's like, it's all the tone, the attitude, the like, I got to have 50 different poses. It's a 30 second video. You have important information about a serious topic. And you need 50 poses? You're looking this way. You're up this way. You're sitting down. You're on top of the light post. You're doing pull-ups. You're, what is with everyone now, every video, especially in TikTok, people have the cadence of like a cartoon character. Yeah, that's like a cartoon character. It's like a cartoon character, cadence and tone and facial expressions and like moving around all the time. Why is everyone talking like cartoon character?

Just give the information. That's all we need. Does that, does anyone, do you absorb the information better when they cut it together that way with 50 different poses and the attitude and the tone and the, the cartoon character, you know, cadence? Does that help anybody? Anyway We need to flock cameras to track every single person who makes videos like that Round them all up and deport them To the surface of the sun

Anyway, these are all legitimate examples of problems with the implementation of flock cameras Some cops are misusing them for personal reasons The cameras also apparently have some technical vulnerabilities Although it's worth pointing out that no one has actually hacked these cameras in real life as far as we know, outside of these proof-of-concept tests. There have been situations where police departments' passwords have been compromised or where camera feeds have been broadcast online by mistake, but it looks like those issues were patched.

In any event, it's true that flat cameras have been abused, which is a problem. The problem is, if you banned every technology that was abused, you wouldn't have any technology left. I mean, there have been cases where bad actors purchased data from wireless carriers, which they obtained via web portals operated by third-party broker. that didn't run any legal checks. That doesn't mean that we should ban cell phones. It means we should punish the brokers who are selling the data.

Along the same lines, when Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was secretly collecting phone data from millions of Verizon users with secret warrants, nobody suggests that we should ban Verizon or cell phones. And for good reason. For all my critiques of modern technology, and there are many, cell phones ultimately do more good than harm. You know, the fact that bad actors can hijack our cell phone data doesn't mean that we should revert to the Stone Age. It means that to the best of our ability, we need to recognize that some degree of surveillance is an inevitable byproduct of the age that we're living in. It's just the reality.

The only practical safeguard against the abuse of that surveillance, aside from the things we've already talked about, putting systems and policies and laws in place, governing when this kind of stuff can be accessed and by who, which we should do. But that all requires that we elect people who will not abuse the technology and punish those who do abuse it or will. End the anarcho tyranny. Now, that's not the most dramatic or compelling solution. It's not a perfect solution. But it's the only one with any chance of success. It's the only choice we have. We can't align with communists for any reason on any issue.

We can't repeat the talking points from activists on MS Now who are lying to your face in order to subvert ice and assist illegal aliens in avoiding detection. I mean, as unpopular as it may be to say, with or without flock, mass surveillance is already here. It's been here for a long time. You've already made yourself 100% trackable and traceable with the cell phone you're using to listen to me right now. And while that may sound ominous, and it is, the truth is, that. There are a few things even worse than mass surveillance. Mass demographic replacement is one of those things. So don't let your concerns about mass surveillance, which are totally legitimate,

turn you into an unwitting supporter of mass demographic replacement. And that's where the flock debate is heading. Whether or not you're a fan of flock cameras, that's the unavoidable reality of the current debate. Now, yes, if you say that out loud, you'll be called a shill, and a Fed and a fascist. But one thing you won't be is an accomplice to the largest foreign invasion this country has ever seen.

You'll be one of the few people who's not giving the communists exactly what they want right now. And whether you support flock or not, that's a pretty good place to be. I'll do for the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow.

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