Weekly Skews - S6 Ep24: BONUS Skews – Flock Off

Episode Date: May 2, 2026

Today we talk about a guy in Colorado who’s trapped in a time loop movie of unwarranted traffic stops because of Big Computer. It’s a silly anecdote connected to the growing privacy and law enforcement nightmare that is Flock Safety, and how cities and counties across the U.S. have helped set up “Netflix for Stalkers.” Do you want to livestream a child’s gymnastics class in Georgia? Flock is the service for you.This is a special bonus episode of Weekly Skews. If you would like to get more Skews in your life, subscribe to our Patreon for just $5 a month for Patreon exclusive episodes released every other week. https://www.weeklyskews.com/moreWeekly Skews is brought to you by Fast Growing Trees. Right now, they have great deals on spring planting essentials, up to half off on select plants. And listeners to our show get TWENTY PERCENT OFF their first purchase when using the code SKEW at checkout.Visit https://www.fastgrowingtrees.com/skew and use the code SKEWThis episode is sponsored by BetterHelp. BetterHelp makes it easy to get matched online with a qualified therapist. Sign up and get 10%  https://www.betterhelp.com/skews Weekly Skews is brought to you by Americans United for Separation of Church and State.If you believe religious freedom is supposed to protect everybody, not be weaponized to turn away good families, visit https://www.au.org/crooked to learn more and become a member today. 

What's up bonus skewers? Patrons across the skewer. Thanks for supporting the show. It's time for another bonus edition of weekly skews. I do think we're going to put this one out as a little tantalizer, a little appetizer for people. So you might be hearing this, even if you're not a patron and you're getting a glimpse of what the patrons get.

It's not going to be too groundbreaking. We just do the show again, but it's like another episode of it. But anyway, I'm Trey and that's Mark. We're recording this on Friday, May 1st. at it's about 5 o'clock p.m. on the east coast, which is where I currently am. I'm in a hotel in Brooklyn, New York. Mark is still there in his mushroom forest back on the west coast. How's it going, Mark?

Good, man. We're talking about some surveillance cameras exploding all over America and a public backlash to them. Flock safety, you guys might be familiar. But before you get to the show, because it's Mother's Day, I wanted to talk about Elon Musk for a second. Here's a big court case where he's suing Sam Altman has been happening in San Francisco. And he featured this bit of testimony who he's asked to define who Chavon Zillis is to him. And he said, my chief of staff.

And yeah, it's important to know here that Chavon Zillis is the mother of four of his children. So I hope she gets a world number one chief of staff mode for Mother's Day. Right. To be fair, though, doesn't Elon, don't he have? have like 32 test tube children or something like that? I mean not literally 32 but you got a ton don't he like he's got like brood mare women right which is yes he has he has 14 acknowledged children okay and they had rumored to have a cult compound with unknown unknown numbers of human broodemaires bearing his children after the after being artificially

insomidated right so that's scuttlebutt right because that's not like straight out of a fucking dystopian sci-fi story or anything at all you know and like you got them hooked up to cables and shit straight into their nipples and stuff like that like some suburban Mad Max stuff or whatever

and everybody's like this guy rules yeah do you remember that that it was a fetish video that went viral on the right wing internet because they thought it was real life like a real thing in China where these guys are being milk for their sperm but it was just like it was a porn video

that it thought was a actual laboratory. Yes. That's where Elon actually lives. So, I always was wondering, do you think Elon gets a mother's day gifts for all of his kids' mothers or just the ones he actually had sex with? You know? If they're lucky.

I think, yeah. I feel like Elon's the kind of guy that's like, hey, you get to live in my, you know, cul-de-sac compound, right? Sex compound. So that's, that's gift. That's enough of a present for you, I feel like. But I don't know. Maybe he definitely has his favorites.

For a while there, he was obviously trotting out a little baby beep boop, you know, the robot noise kid. That was the dedicated mascot child. So he probably takes care of that kid's mom, which is the pop singer lady. Anyway. Yeah, I forget I mean I have with Grimes, but yeah, like, so X was the only one he actually, like, he was using the human shield back when he thought he was going to be assassinated. The rest of his kids are either he doesn't like hanging out with him or he doesn't like using him as human shields. So what basically happened to this lawsuit is Elon's suing Sam

Altman for stealing open AI from him basically or like getting his investment under false pretenses because it was originally a non-profit and then Sam Altman pivoted to trying to make money with it which Elon thinks is bad even though he's trying to make money with Grock. I don't know it doesn't matter. This is a key moment to understanding the whole trial because it's basically

like it's different competing narratives for whose company is utopian and whose is dystopian but to me they're both dystopian but that's not really relevant to this trial but like this is actually like Sam Baldwin's lawyer introduced this a moment during cross-examination.

This is a key moment from a Tesla analyst call where Elon said so like if I go ahead and build this enormous AI-enabled robot army can I just be ousted sometime in the future?

He was asking if he builds a robot army can Tesla fire him and turn the robot army against him? Yeah. It's wild it took that long for that to occur to him.

To me I feel like if I was building a robot army? One of my very first thoughts would be like, wait a minute, they're not going to like tear me to pieces, are they? Like, they're going to be cool about that, right? They're only going to tear to pieces the people whom I direct them to tear to pieces.

Right. Took him a little longer to get there. This is essentially like a lawsuit deciding between two of the wings of the Tescriol cult that we talk about all the time. But like, so it's kind of like if Methodists and Baptists sue each other in court to see which one was the best

you know, subgenre of Christianity. but like Sam Altman's in the Will Go Extinct but be the AI's pet wing and Elon is in the We'll Be Immortal with Brainship AIs

that serve us on Mars wing, right? And it's just a really funny idea to let a jury decide who gets to be the Pope of this stupid fucking religion. Right. Can I ask you something though? Because I didn't, you know,

most of everything I've ever learned about Sam Altman I've learned from you. You just said he's in the we'll go extinct, but we'll get to be their pet wing. like that's his like official position on it it's like yeah this will pretty much end humanity as we know it but you know we'll get to at least be like a you know

a favored servant of the robot gods or something like that and my question is if that is his public position why is he still actively pursuing it because it makes him billions of dollars or because he's like that would be better for humanity than what we currently are doing or like how does he justify actively pursuing an end goal like that? He thinks there's a lot of different instinctionist cults in the Bay Area, but he thinks we're building a replacement species for us that is AI,

and that's good. It's kind of like what homo sapiens replace crowbagan or whatever. So like we will either learn how to coexist with the, like Sam Altman has already paid for service to have his brain digitized when he dies so he can be uploaded into the AI and live forever. Like this is a thing that you, I am not making, this up. So like

the, so these are things that Musk has said so far in his trial. Larry Page called me a speciesist for being pro-human because AI is a

competing species and if you prefer humans over AI that means you're a speciesist. Larry Page was you know what I was like Google yeah, I think Google yeah. So quote, we could achieve a better

AI human symbiosis. Elon said that and I worked as a lumberjack actually, Elon said. It was pertinent. He also got asked about a haunted house he lived in

that he believed haunted. Anyway, it doesn't matter. My favorite moment of this trial is, you know, the famous example of a loaded question, like a logic trap is like, have you stopped beating your wife? Have you stopped beating your wife? Right. Yes. Because if you say, yes, that implies that it's a tacit admission that at one point you did beat your wife. Right. And if you say no, that tacitly implies you're going to keep on beating your wife. So, right. So Elon tried to invoke that because he was tired of being asked yes or no questions

even though that's how you do deal with a hostile witness when you're cross-examining someone there's no other way to do it because you can't make Elon answer a fucking question. So he says the classic answer to a yes or no question is not so simple. For example, if you ask the question, will you stop beating your wife? That is a different question that does have a yes or no answer to it.

Yeah. So, yes. Guy, we're a ruled by the dumbest motherfuckers, man. So typically, you try like this. So people are processing outside, you expect them to be taking one side of the other? But instead of people protesting outside, holding up signs with images of both Altman and Musk looking ugly as shit with the signs read, like, Am I the asshole? And with the answer, everyone sucks here.

If you don't know, that's Reddit parlance. There's a very popular subreddit called Am I the asshole. And one of the, there's only so many answers you can give. You say, you are the asshole. You are not the asshole. There are no asshole. or ESH, everyone sucks here. So that's like straight off of Reddit,

which totally tracks, given the setting of this particular trial. Right, but it's like, everyone sucks here should also be the jury's verdict. Like, Elon only invested $38 million in OpenAI, which is like, that would, if I got $38 million, you would never hear of me again, right?

Right. But for Elon to drop in the bucket, he doesn't care about $38 million. And like, so, like, he just wants to try to put Open A out of business. and like I wish they would all be put out of fucking business. But this is a pretty funny moment too. Elon told the jury,

if you asked AI to analyze this court case, for example, it will give really good analysis that he paused for a minute and added, but you need to be careful that it doesn't hallucinate. They're trying to get control of our species over a thing that will make up a fake verdict in his stupid trial. And it'd be funny if the jury came back and said,

Your Honor, our verdict is that Claude says to kill all these motherfuckers. Right. Yes. Yeah, the omniscient ghost god and the machine kind of trips out sometimes, so you've got to navigate that. But otherwise, you know, doing really good work. All right, well, thank you guys for being here. We appreciate it. You know, no plugs on the bonus episodes, as always. So we'll just dive right in, as we always do with the daily dumbass. Matt, graphic, please. Today's DD, our stupid panopticon for trying to drive this one poor guy in Colorado insane. We get a little glimpse into the dystopian future.

Colorodan keeps getting pulled over because flock surveillance cameras tell police he has an active warrant. He doesn't. But he can't convince the surveillance network to leave him alone. Our Spencer Soisher has that. Sorry. over here. So we're going to talk with this guy.

I'll show more clips in a second. But this is all happening. This guy gets pulled over like multiple times per day in his little town because the camera keeps flagging him and sending cops to pull him over. All right.

This is all happening because he has an O in his license. Or what? How did the robot get programmed to target this dude? Well, it's a combination of trusting a computer too much. The computer surveilling everyone all the time

and cops, as usual, being lazy as fuck, right? So he has a guy has an O in his license. license plate. I guess if cops don't know whether it's a zero or an old old one license plate, they put a warrant out for fucking both. What? Right? That feels like something

that the user should have been fixed like a long time ago. You know, I know there's just to fix it. Make the zeros have a fucking slash through them or whatever. Like it's not that hard of a problem, dude. You can't just land on well, we'll just arrest both, you know,

if we can't tell. Like, that's that's such a An American policing fucking solution. I mean, imagine like a different thing. It was like, we know his name is Mark, but we don't know his last name. So just put a warrant out on Mark. Right. So basically this is this guy's hell and watch a little bit of this video.

You got to bet. In any fashion. Kyle made sure his dash cam was reporting yesterday. After Cherry Hills Village police officers, pull them over near the same area Saturday. Hello. We got you last week. Yeah, for the warrant. I was driving through here yesterday, and I got pulled over again.

So here's the really madding part about this. Here's the part that's going to make you fucking furious, because you'd think they'd be able to fix this, right? Like, all they got to do is push a button. It's like, okay, we've got a warrant out for the wrong guy. We know, now we know it's not the O, right? It must be the zero guy at minimum. But that still is good enough for the police department, nor flock.

He's got this next clip bad. This is going to drive you fucking insane, right? Kyle has called both the Gilpin County Courts and Sheriff's Office to get off the list, but they've told him he needs to know who the Warren is for, which nobody can tell it. Yeah, all I know is I'm in this system now. He has to solve the crime. Easy way to get out of the system once. He has to fucking figure out who the warrant's actually for, not them, for them, for them to fucking take him off the list.

What, how, in what universe does that make any kind of sense? What is it? I don't understand what the justification for that is supposed to be. They all seem to acknowledge, sorry, bro. you're right, it isn't you. But they can't take him out of the system unless he does some like vigilante vengeance movie plot

where he takes the law into his own hands and finds out, you know, who the actual guy is that whatever, robbed a couple of 7-Elevens or whatever happened. Like, I mean, that's insane. It's like in the dark night. None of that is how any of that should ever work. Remember the dark night

when Batman has to go to Hong Kong and render a guy and leave him handcuffed back on the courthouse of Gotham, right? He has to do that. He did get his little town to take him off their list so he doesn't get pulled over as long as he doesn't leave the fucking confines of his little city.

But he's basically imprisoned in this little city because if he leaves the state cops will fucking pull him over. Again, we have insanely military to ask cops who can fucking fly off the handle and shoot him anymore. This is basically a death threat

from the fucking computer company. But I wanted to start. off with this to have a fun example of this because this is the funniest nightmare scenario for this technology but the country is currently being blanketed by these things these flock cameras this is flock safety by the way the company that runs these cameras and town's both big and small um we're talking here about automated license plate readers to start with these are uh you know cameras and capture and analyze images of all passing vehicles storing details like your cars location date and time they also capture the cars make model color and identifying features such as dense roof racks bumper stickers and bumper stickers right which are political

sometimes and they turn these all into searchable data points via i these cameras collect out on millions of vehicles regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime right now flock operates in six thousand cities across the united states with over 76 000 license plate readers and counting they say but the website slash organization deflock dot me has mapped over 90 000 cameras nationwide which means flocks is lying about how many cameras they have for which this flock CEO guy named Garrett Langley referred to deflock.combe. Me as a terroristic organization for counting their cameras. Right. So, okay, let me ask you this. Are these just like, these are like, the smarter versions of basically like red light cameras and that type of thing, which I thought,

you know, they became all the rage 10, 12 years ago, I feel like. And then I thought they got sued a lot and were taken out of a lot of municipalities and stuff for various reasons. and it's sort of fallen out of favor, but now they're trying to do that again with this version of it, which is like a beefed up version of that same technology, basically? It's beefed up, and to me there's beefed up to a degree

there's a huge dividing line. I'm annoyed by stuff like stoplight cameras. I've gotten ticket multiple times from stoplight cameras, but I did run the fucking red lights. A couple times by accident, but I did do it, right? The red light camera activates

when you commit a crime, and then sends a picture of you committing the crime to your house with a bill for a tick. Right. And these just do it all the time, no matter what you're doing. These take a picture

of every fucking license plate that goes by. The idea would be so you could track, like if somebody is accused to, if a crime is committed with a particular license plate, like the guy we just watched,

then you can put a license plate into the system. It would tell you every point where it's been captured. You can watch the car drive around. Right. So the pictures come before the crime. Is an important distinction here to me.

So recently 57 cities of canceled contracts with flock over privacy and trust stuff for pretty good reasons. which is what we're going to talk about today. This is one of those things like Americans, of all stripes, we're really weird country where people can be simultaneously authoritarian

and libertarian when it comes to their own personal behavior. So pretty much all of us have some sort of libertarian streak, and people really fucking hate these things. Just this week, this small town of Auburn, California, it's outside of Sacramento, I think a town of about 12, 13,000 people. They had 12,000 flock camps, cameras as until recently and now they're down to two because they keep getting destroyed or stolen or breaking then three were stolen this week somebody threw them in a canal but this raises the question to me how effective are your anti-crime cameras if people are doing crimes to your anti-crime cameras right you know what's funny about this I've probably told you this before Mark one of my very first bits ever was it I mean it's not really a bit though it's just a real thing that I was told there's no traffic lights in my hometown of salina Tennessee and my dad always told me

I don't know if it's true, but my dad always told me that they attempted to install traffic lights on the town square in the 80s, but that didn't take because people kept shooting them out in the middle of the night every time they would, every time they would hang them up, you know, because ain't no goddamn commie robot's going to tell us when to stop and when to go. My God. But, yeah, so, you know, the more things change, I guess, is all I'm saying. Yeah, so there's, we need to make, so. Flok has different kinds of cameras that we'll get to, but they say of their license plate readers,

which is the ones or most of their cameras, I believe, that they have no facial recognition and do not establish movement or, quote, pattern of life, which you'll see in terms of, like, assassination missions the military uses, or are you doing stick out of, you know, missions. When you're watching,

people turn to figure out what their routines are. Now, it's already a calm because they, like, it just says they do not establish pattern of life. These statements are written by lawyers, you know what I'm saying? Do not. and would not slash could not are completely different fucking things.

Right. Right. So, like, if Katie was like, Trey, are you having an affair? And you were like, right now? So, the thing is about this, like, they say they're choosing not to do it, but any given moment, you can make another choice.

And I want to quote here, in a flock product demo of the search interface, a flock staffer walks through long-term suspect tracking in the user interface. is a product demo they gave for law enforcement on a website that's on their fucking, a video that's on their fucking website. You can see 14 days of pattern of life or 30 days of pattern of life. So you can, once you've zoomed in on your suspect, you can start to see what they have

been doing, where they have they been going, and you have a heat map that you know and love, which you can toggle on and off. So while publicly they say they don't do pattern of life, they're showing cops, they're saying, hey, look, we can do pattern of life. You know where this person's going all the time. Right. Okay. So I'm sorry.

Yeah. So what the pattern of life, so that basically means they can use these to like put together a picture of any given person's like movements over a set amount of time. So they could show like where they went, where they were and what they did, you know, if you want them to. That's what that means. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

It picks his kid up from school at 2.45. Yeah, yeah. So Oshkosh, Wisconsin just dropped flock and they learned they were lying about their other capabilities. which raises a couple of questions. Like one, what can cops do with these things? Two, what can non-cops do stuff with these things? How much access to regular people have? And three, what can flock do with these things?

And are there any legal constraints? And I can't really find any sort of legal constraints for what flock can do once they put their fucking cameras up. Right. So. Right. Well, how would there be? We don't have any kind of real, like, regulation or anything yet, right?

For any of this type of shit, that's part of the problem. And a lot of people who advocate for us not having any. Because it would stymie growth or whatever they say. Oh, like, for example, you're getting in a few states right now. I think Janet Mills, a governor of Maine just signed a bill, like, forbidding people from trying to town from trying to ban data centers. Like, I have a feeling if you tried to, like, a town tried to ban flot cameras because we're talking about the city, like the ones owned by cities and towns right now,

but a lot of private businesses have them. So, like, if you tried to ban them within a sound limits, I'm sure the state government would forbid you from banning them right now. So it's the opposite of regulation. Right. And like, here's a weird dystopian example. Okay. Second Wisconsin mention of this show, shout out Wisconsin. A small city by the name of Verona voted last year to pull out of a contract with flock in hopes for protecting residents' privacy.

But in the months after the city chose to end its agreement with flock, Mayor Luke Diaz noticed the cameras were still up. City officials reached out to flock to demand they take down the cameras that were placed around the small town, which is suburb of Madison. Flok ignored them and left the cameras up saying they were too busy and they said the cameras weren't operating, don't worry about it. But then the mayor was suspicious because he hadn't taken them down even though the town wasn't paying for them and he had city staff put black plastic bags over the cameras. Then Flok came and took them down.

So how did Flok know that the cameras were covered with plastic bags if no one was looking through them? Right. Yeah. So be quoted from Mayor Diaz. The fact they didn't take the cameras down shows that we are the product. And they were never really selling it to us in the first place. What they're doing is selling it to much larger agencies and the ability to spout a ton of people. So who the fuck is paying them? If the city, if they keep surveilling these cities after they stop being paid, I guess it's the feds. But on a flock webinar from January, the company policy lead, denied a federal back door, then 90 seconds later goes on to describe how the product has a federal back door, but dismisses criticism of it saying it's only a pilot program. So it's not, we're not doing it. We're just starting to do it.

Yeah, we're just figuring out how best to do it. That's not the same thing as doing it. Trying to really drill down the most appropriate way to tackle, stripping you of all your privacy and mining all your data out to the highest bidder. And because this is considered like an investigator tool,

like an investigatory tool, it's not really clear like, like some judges have ruled that like you need something approaching a warrant to like use, people have some expectation of privacy in public. Judges, courts have consistently ruled. How much is a real, really arguable?

But like, they don't appear to be any prior warrant restraints in practice with these because cops apparently can just use them to go search through databases, like they're Googling stuff, even with no cause necessarily cause for a crime, you know, evidence for crime, have been committed. Like, they've been caught a bunch of times, cops, using flock cameras to stalk women. Okay. There have been 14 cases around across the country where cops have been alleged to have abused automatic license plate reader access to follow spouses, access, and even, exes, and even complete strangers. So basically, a cop.

are seeing a hot babe out in public and then going back to the office and looking up a license plate to follow her home. Right. Yeah. It's like, it's another great example of like this is, this stuff like sucks for everybody and should be frightening for everyone, but it's just like so much worse for women. Yeah. Like so many things. Like the implications are true real horror movie shit. Because we all, you know, cops have a ponchaun for, you know, domestic violence and not handling breakups well. and that type of thing or whatever. So you put this type of tech in the hands of a jilted cop who's been left by his old lady or whatnot. And it's like, it's a very terrifying prospect for the woman there.

I think everybody's familiar with the, I mean, a lot of people are familiar with the staff that 40% of married male police officers abuse their wives physically. But I don't think everyone realizes that's a survey data. Those are the ones who self-reported doing it. Damn, no. didn't know that. I mean, I guess I never really thought about how how they arrived at that number, but yeah, that, no, that

had not occurred to me. That's, yeah, that's wild. So the thing about that, do you see, so I said 14 cases where cops have been found using ALPRs to stock women. But the thing to know about that is like, because that doesn't sound like many, right? But, uh, that, all 14 of those that comes in 2014 when a flock really exploded into 4,000 more cities in the last two years. And the bulk of those 14 cases were uncovered by the victims themselves. It wasn't because there's any sort of like oversight or fellow cops caught them or whatever

or like the system reported them for abusing it. It's because people realized they were being stopped and then retroactively figured out how. So if you think you're not being stalked, my question to you is have you checked. Right. Yeah. And just to clarify a second ago, you said they expanded massively in 2014, but you mean 2024, right? Yeah, 2024. Sorry.

Okay. I just want to clear that. because it's like, you know, it's that amount of cases and that amount of time, you know what I mean? If it had been 12 years, it sort of changes the context of it. But yeah, this is all, you know, fucking brave new world shit we're all living through. So some of this stuff is available when you do through Freedom of Information Act access and requests and stuff. And I got a fun anecdote to share with you after we get back from break about stopping my wife. Sounds fun.

Yeah, last week or the week before was your wife. sexually assaulting your dog. Now we've got a fun stalking your wife. But, yeah, Aaron, coming through with the material each and every week. All right. We'll be right back. Weekly skews is brought to you by fast-growing trees. That's right.

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All right, and we're back. So I understand, Mark, you've got a fun stalking anecdote for us. I always love those. So research in this topic, I found this website called Have I Been Flocked, where you can go search your license plates and see if you've showed up on one of these cameras. The caveat being only the ones that it were, where the records have been obtained, via FOIA request. So it would not show up if you've been captioned a private camera.

It's supposed to be disappeared or deleted after 14 or 30 days. And different jurisdictions have different, like, you know, rules for what they released to the public. All right. So I'm sitting here, I'm like, I'm going to search my license plate, my wife's license plate, to see what shows up. Now, this is right after I was talking about cop stock and their wives. I'm sitting at the kitchen table when my wife walks in while I'm searching her license plate on this website. so I'm literally doing the thing I'm fucking shit

I'm going to except I was doing it for research purpose right yeah yeah you're like research I want to see just how nefarious this is but then you pull it up and you're like

she went she went to that neighborhood how many time what the I couldn't yeah really I'm such a chicken shit I would only do it if I thought I had nothing

to suspect if it was he was up to some dirt I wouldn't want to know so I wouldn't have looked but anyway no I didn't know even you just saying just now that that was the thing

the first thought I had was like, I kind of wish I hadn't learned that. That even existed, you know what I mean? It's like, I'm going to go, I don't know if I can resist going and checking that out and then getting freaked the fuck out about something. But anyway, and I'm not even talking about Katie. I'm talking about myself, actually. You know what I'm not? Someone's fucking keeping tabs on me or whatever for commie purposes.

Right. Well, if it makes you, again, we don't have access to everything, but if it makes you feel better, neither mind nor errands, it lights and plates and played showed up anywhere on these things. So, but I want to note here, there's at least two kinds of cameras that flock is rolled out so far. You got the ALRP is what you talked about. And they also have AI cameras for trapping people that are called condor cameras that they like to talk about less because to be fair, they, you know, have less of them or they're just rolling them out. And you might be thinking, well, you know, this is less than ideal, but this is cops, right? it's not like everyone can use this shit.

You know, there must be some kind of professional oversight. You know, yada, yada, yada. To which I want to say, are you new here? There's an independent YouTuber by the name of Ben Jordan. Ben with two ends. You can look up his stuff. His videos are really good. He used search engines to find administrative interfaces for about 60 of flocks AI cameras.

These are trail cameras and stuff filming public locations. And so first of all, I give a share. shout out to Ben and four for media who he's been working with, who I'm stealing from for this right here. This is a video he made called, the flat camera leak is like Netflix for stalkers. Again, he found this just via search engines, access to 60 flock cameras. Here you get, police video, Matt. In just the time that it took to count and verify these vulnerabilities, I saw a family in North Carolina loathe their infant and a bunch of merchandise in a loz parking lot. And I suppose one could cross-reference their license plate with the

Park Mobile Data Breach and find out exactly where the garage is that will store these new fancy tools. I watched a man leave his house in the morning in New York. I watched a woman jogging alone on a forest trail in Georgia. This trail had multiple cameras and I could watch a man rollerblade and then take a break to watch rollerblading videos on his phone. How? Because the cameras AI automatically zoomed in on it. Just like it zoomed in on a couple arguing at a street market in Atlanta. So what? They're still anonymous, right? No, they're not. Within two minutes of open source intelligence using a commercial facial recognition engine, I found out that one of them just finished medical school and the other is dealing with chronic irritable bowel syndrome. The couple also

just had a baby last year and they have a pretty concerning debt to income ratio. I also know that they drove... My God, dude. I'm not going to lie, there's always been a part of me and it's like I've always had the sort of like mental wherewithal to hide this from people because it's like I know that it's kind of dumb. But there's always been deep inside of me this, this, a little bit of that streak of like, well, you know, look, if you're not doing anything wrong, then fucking at the end of the day, I've always kind of had some of that. But like this shit is like, I don't know how anyone isn't freaked the fuck out by something like that. You know what I mean? Like people have it's like human nature to value the privacy at least a little bit. This is fucking, I mean, that's wild.

He's just some guy. Like, anybody takes a special interest in you and has any kind of like technical aptitude whatsoever. And they can find out, you know, track your wife's movements all throughout the day or whatever, you know, like, I don't know. That shit is nuts. Get access to your medical records and all this stuff. Crazy.

That's just, because what Ben was using there is stuff that's publicly available, right? Like the public available access to. to the flock cameras, stuff that's been dumped on the internet because of data breaches from companies fucking up to security, and the rest of it's just publicly available tools if you know where to look, right? So those are just 60 flock cameras. Again, law enforcement has access to every camera. They have access to much better databases and much better.

So, yeah, like, in one hand, it's horrifying that cops have access to this stuff, but if you're not doing anything wrong, then what do you have to worry about, right? But you also, if you're leaving all this stuff available to the public, you've got this technology, it's a sensible purpose. is to fight crime, but also lets you know wouldn't wear specific women jog alone with their earbuds in. Right, yeah. Yeah, no.

So what the fuck? That ain't really. Exactly. Yeah. I mean, what if you want to know what kids play when unsupervised at the park? Got this next video about it. Here's an exposed block safety camera

permanently pointed at a playground near the Bay Area in California. Openly and publicly broadcasting both live and archived video footage of young children playing unattended. Again, just seeing this. So if you watch a video to see a kid you like, you can go back to the archives and see if the kid comes every day.

Like Silicon Valley has created a restaurant lobster tank for fucking pedophiles. Right. And like, I don't know why they think this is a good idea to do. I get the idea of wanting to have surveillance at a playground or whatever in case something happens to a kid. But like having that. available 24-7 to, you know, the people who want to make something happen to a kid.

It seems like, you know, incredibly short-sighted and ill-advised. Like, this is one of those things where it's like, again, like I said a minute ago, I don't get how anyone alive isn't immediately like, well, this is fucking nuts and not good. But, I mean, a lot of people don't know about it. I didn't know about it. You told me about it, you know? Like, that's definitely a part of it. I didn't know it was this fucking bad

until I started diving into this but like like so there's also like a really pointient moment in here where Ben points something out in the video where like I hadn't thought about like so like you're right if something went wrong at the park I guess it would be good to have

a facial recognition camera that would tell you who took the kid right? I think you know obviously like you do want to stop bad things from happening but there's like a hidden cost here that you don't think about when you think about surveillance. He shows that same

playground when it's empty. An adult man walks by looks around and decides to have a swing. He sits down and he swings. It's a quiet moment of like introspection and solitude. Maybe the guys remember his childhood, remembering him playing, maybe his

dad brought him on that park, whatever. But the whole point is that moment's only possible because he's not fucking being observed or didn't know he was. Right. So like it's like we've gotten whimsy down 40% your honor we'd think it's a cop standing at a press conference being like we've got we've gotten quiet moments of introspection off the you know down along with the cocaine trade

it's just like sick and drows me insane uh that's something called uh it's called the hawthorn effect which security companies brag about cameras like deterring theft and shit which i need to point out here like flock always brags about berkeley's going down but then when independent people come in and do data they found a bunch of towns where berkeley's actually went up when flock cameras were put in I don't think that's a cause and effect thing. I just think it doesn't fucking do as much as you think it does. No, I mean, honestly, I've always thought that. I mean, I guess the idea is, if you're talking about a burglar, they want to make it.

The idea, it's like in a zombie movie, you ain't got to be the fastest guy. You've just got to be faster than the slowest guy or whatever. And I guess maybe the idea with home security is make your house, you know, not the most tantalizing. or whatever, but I've always thought, like, if somebody wants to get in there, you know, they're going to fucking do it, probably. I mean, unless you've got, like, armed guards and stuff like that.

So, you know, I've always thought that the kind of deterrent factor is overstated, too, you know. Like, people really want to do it or they're truly desperate, whatever. Yeah, but even then if you're... Right, to quote my papa, who had a eighth grade education,

a lock only stops an honest man. right so these things like so uh like talking about the backlash about this stuff so uh in dunwoody Georgia which is a small suburb of Atlanta I believe a blog post written by a local resident by the name of Jason Juniore went viral and caused a huge backlash and what he found was by he basically followed a pre-information information at request for access logs to the city's flock cameras and what he found was that law enforcement from around the country, including people at Flock headquarters, were accessing sensitive cameras in the town to demonstrate.

They're using basis as a demonstration of what they were doing to other cities. So Flock would log in and show other cops stuff going around Dunwoody, including surveillance tech and a children's gymnastics room, a playground, a school, a Jewish community center, and a pool. So, hey, fellow law enforcement enthusiasts, do you want to look at, like, an adult, like an elderly person's aerobics class, a Jewish community center, and some kids wearing leotards? for what fucking purpose is this shit?

Right. So I'd have to do the like to be fair thing here. So Flock's defense for themselves is pretty interesting because they responded to this outraged and done Liddy. Flock argues, this is a blog from its CEO or one of his executive, sorry.

Flock also argued that is more transparent than any other surveillance company because he creates these access logs at all and they can be obtained using public records requests. Quote, I must state the irony of the situation. We're one of the few technology companies in this space dedicated to radical transparency. But this raises the question.

What other surveillance companies are you fucking talking about that are recording videos of her children's gymnastics classes? Right. Can you tell us? Right. I mean, isn't this kind of like, sort of like going back to like Edward Snowden and the NSA and all that stuff when all that first came out,

it's like people don't realize the degree to which they are or can be surveilled or whatever? And so it's been just ratcheted up ever since then. And, you know, that was using systems and stuff that people had no idea existed. So this is like a public company that if you own a business, you can buy their services for, but there's like some DARPA funded shit or something that, you know, we don't even know about that also is doing the same thing at all times.

Yeah. And so, like, as far as like flocks defense of itself, that we actually, we let you look at what we're looking at, well, that might be going away soon because states have started to realize that it would be annoyed by the public backlash again? So, like, two states that I know of, at least Arizona and Connecticut, are considering bills that would limit Freedom of Information Act requests that pertain to flock data,

which I guess is good because what, like it would potentially like get penalties for stuff like flock making available, publicly available videos of children's playgrounds, right? Right, right. I was actually, I was, I was just thinking that. This feels like it just damned if you do,

damned if you don't, or rather, just fuck all of this it shouldn't be happening at all but it's like the idea that they're like well at least we're transparent we make it available to people but that's like the problem

we were just talking about right it means it's available to playground footage is available to pedos and shit but then you're like but if you say well you shouldn't do that well then now we have the fucking top secret minority report version of it

that's cloaked in shadow and everything and that is also bad so you know Well, so the videos, the actual video footage, those were available through a security loophole. They had just clearly fucked up or didn't care enough, right? I think what the FOIA law stuff would prevent is like the, have I been flocked stuff or I went to search my wife's license plate. So in theory, it would curtail some stalking behavior like me stalking my way.

But I don't know if it would like, you know, it is, it doesn't, it would, it would, the problem, like, you know, the 14 people who figured out the cops were stalking them through Freedom of Information I request, basically what it would do

was stop them from being, no one would ever know if cops ever stalked them again unless the cops self-reported or calling each other. What's cops policing each other? Yeah, good fucking luck. So,

I want to quote here from that blog from flock. I understand the concern from the resident, but is unequivocally false to assert that flock or the police or city officials are doing anything other

than using technology to stop major crime in the city. This crime panic in which we're handing over privacy, which is the core basis of every other right as a free person, we're giving it away in fear of fucking nothing.

Right. Stop being the crimes in the city. Like, the Patriot Act and stuff, right? Like, I feel like that's where this type of... I'm sure there was versions of this even before that, but it feels like that when it's when that sort of went mainstream

or whatever. Like, you know, the idea that it's worth it to hand over your privacy in the name of law and order, basically. What's the Ben Franklin quote, those who give up freedoms in exchange for security, deserve neither or whatever? And we're like, basically, please let me hand over my freedom in exchange

for a little bit of fake security. And this fake security that they're trying to achieve in Dunwoody, Georgia is, when I say it's in service of nothing, Dunwoody, Georgia is a suburb of 51,000 people with a median income of $121,000,000, a year. It's the hometown of Ryan Seacrest. In 2025, the murder rate dropped

100% from 1 to 0. It had 68 burglaries in the entirety of last year. And to fight this, I want you to look at the picture from their fucking headquarters, Trey, where they have a, where cops watch all these screens. If you pull up this image, man.

This is minority report where they report actual minorities. Like, look at that fucking shit. that's funny. It's like, I mean, it would be a little bit dated, but that's like a funny sketch idea. I kind of can't believe no one ever did that. Minority report, but yeah, it's just, yeah,

the tech only reports minorities. That's cool. I mean, AI is racist because it's trained upon by humans, so it kind of is that. But like, but like, I just like, I just like don't understand, like, why would you, like, in a time where in politics where people would complain about any type of. any type of public investment.

You can't invest in libraries or fucking schools, making buses or subways free, providing food for poor people is like off limits in any way, shape, or form. We can't invest in scientific research. We can't fucking give AIDS medicines to kids in Africa. Healthcare. We will spend unlimited money

to stop the 0.5 of homicides that have happened in the last two years, yearly, in Dunwoody, Georgia. There's a lady sitting there 24-7 watching these 400 cameras that are recording all. their moves for what? Like it's like it drives me insane.

And I want to note here that flock has acquired aerodome, a manufacturer of drones for law enforcement, has announced plans to produce its own light of camera drones. You want to feel schizophrenic as fuck, Trey? I want you to watch this video of our coming future if flock has its way. Here's a video. China has created drones that look like birds. Watch this. So, okay, I'm getting all the reality, like proving all these lunatic conspiracy theories, right?

About so many things, all these people I made fun up for years, because I'm sure you're aware, but the birds aren't real, birds are government surveillance drones. It was almost like a meme conspiracy theory, like a judge. like a joke conspiracy theory that like became its own thing and now like even that is real apparently or is about to be real so like dude what the fuck is

going on? Yeah so right now flocks like defensive itself is like oh it's mostly like license plate readers they don't look at faces right then they roll out the faces then they buy an air then they buy like an aerial drone company you think they're going to be happy

just with the license plate readers strapped telephone poles and shit but I think you're fucking insane because a dead and like dumb woody georgia if they feel they need to surveil like 25 cameras in a town of 51,000 people why wouldn't they launch the birds with a had drones in it right yeah why would each person have their own bird drone falling around that's what they do every day every day well before long there'll be some got businessman walking home past the playground and his dad just died or something like that and he has this moment of reflection and he goes and

his dad used to push him on the swing so he goes and sits in the swing tries to enjoy this moment and then like a robot crow lands next to him and like pulls a little gun out or a taser or something. It's like state your purpose citizen. You know, like how far away are we from that happening? And again, I hate something like a fucking libertarian freak here, but like like like like it's not that I think that has to happen. It's like, but like we're just like drifting that direction and yeah. People go with complaints. about this shit at city councils.

And like here's the, there was a huge backlash in Doug Woody against this. People wouldn't complain about the city council meetings and then what happened? Here's the punchline. After flock was caught,

demonstrated their crime fighting capabilities by letting cops around the country watched the people of Dunwoody swim in their own town's pool. The town renewed their contract anyway. They just did that this week. So like, people apparently,

no amount of outrage or complaining in their fucking democracy will stop you from being observed. Right. What is the, in that scenario, is it a thing like we talked about with B.J. Barham all those, you know, weeks ago when he was talking about him running for like these lower level offices like city council because like the town is paying the money to the company, right? And the town's people don't want it to happen, but they still vote for it to happen. And it's just like

because someone on the council is benefiting from it, you know what I mean? Or that type of thing. someone's in somebody's pocket or something. It's like low level lobbying or at the city council level. Like, why not listening to people? You know how you didn't know this was happening? I kind of didn't either if I started looking deeply into it, like to this degree. Like, I think most people, like the city council probably made a smart bet that most people have no idea that's happening. And even when informed about it, kind of don't care because they're not doing anything wrong.

But the crime panic is ongoing and, constant. So people are, like, you can find people defending Flock being like, well, there was a woman in our article about Dunwoody where she was like, well, I think we just got to get the crime down so I'm in favor of this. It's like, but no one ever asked her, what fucking crime are you talking about, lady? She just thinks she's under threat all the time.

I don't know. But like, the thing is like, even if you want to be watched, we just establish, we talk about Rowan and Wisconsin that Flock will do it for free. You can just stop paying them and ICE or whoever will continue

funding them to fucking watch you. So just like, let the contracts lapse. That's my, that's my, that's my, that's my, that's my budgetary tip for these small towns. Right. Is let them do the dystopia for free. But before we get out of here, the reason I want to talk about the guy up top in Colorado who keeps getting nonstop pulled over, really, I just wanted to do the whole segment to talk about this case I just found about recently, this guy in California.

This is an absolutely maddening case to being trapped in the criminal justice, adjacent to the system in a way where no one will listen to you and it will, and it will be. make you want to fucking pull your hair out. Yeah. This case was first, you know, went fire one, 20, 2003, 24, and I missed it somehow, but it's back in the news because the real asshole here is appealing his conviction for being too harsh because the judge went over the sentencing guidelines. I think when I explained to this case, you'll be like, they absolutely should put him

back in jail forever. Okay. So we got two guys. The asshole here, his real name is Matthew David Kearans. In the late 80s, Kieran's worked at a hot dog stand in Albuquerque with a guy named William Woods, who was otherwise homeless. Kieran stole Woods wallet, then his identity.

So from here forward, we will call them real bill and fake bill. Right. Did you follow me? Right. Yeah, fake bill is not the homeless guy. Fake bill is a guy that stole the identity from the homeless guy who is real bill, real bill. Right.

And I can't figure out. He did get a bunch of loans out. in real bill's name so I think that was original motivation but he also just got married and had kids

under his new identity as fake bill right he built a career as fake bill he worked in like IT admin stuff real bill

tried several times to reclaim his identity but no one believed him because he's fucking homeless right so like I said fake bill took out

a bunch of loans in real bill's name real bill went to the bank to report those weren't his loans the bank then called fake bill

who said that real bill was actually the bill who was fake. So the bank turned real bill into the cops who arrested him for stealing his own goddamn identity and threw him at a mental institution refusing to admit that he wasn't himself. Oh my God.

When I tell you I mean you started this by saying that but if I was not insane that would literally turn me insane because like one of my biggest hangups I have on planet Earth is when I'm like accused of something that isn't the case. Like I always say it's like if people want to talk shit about me and it's like oh he's a pandering left you know libtard dip shit I'm like yeah you got me whatever but like when they would

people say like his act that accent's fake he's clearly faking it it's just a whole thing that he's doing or whatever it drives me nuts even like low level shit like that or like I met a comic once for the first time and she was like no we know each other you did my show you did you kind of had a whole thing on stage where you insulted everybody and the crowd got upset and I was like, that never happened. She was convinced it happened. Turns out it was Drew. She was mixing me and Drew up.

Drew did that. But I could not make her believe that that was Drew, not me, even though it was Drew, not me. And you see me, I'm getting fired up about it now. This was eight years ago. Like, that type of thing drives me nuts. So something like this, dude, I would end up needing to be in a rubber room, just slamming my head against the wall of the top. Because I would, this would cause a full-blown breakdown in me. something like this.

And also when the whole world is convinced that you aren't you, like you must start thinking that you actually are crazy. Right. Because like real bill, they had to forcibly medicate him. He was in jail for a fucking year. So how this all ended back in, I think, 2024, was that fake bill was living in Wisconsin, working remotely as an IT administrator,

making $140,000 a year for the University of Iowa. he called the campus police report that he was still being harassed by a real bill he was still trying to get his identity back but what he did was he fucked up by accidentally insulting he still goddamn eric he actually insulted the iowa college cop he basically said you're just a campus cop i don't expect you'll be able to do anything so the campus cop was like all right bet challenge accepted so he made them both get fucking dna tests which anyone could have done since it's all started in 1988

and he unraveled the whole goddamn thing, and then fake bill got arrested for pretending to be fake bill for fucking 30 years or whatever. And now he's appealing saying his 12-year goddamn sentence is too harsh. I had changed my mind about the death penalty. I am pro death penalty for this one guy fucking specifically. Yeah. Yeah, dude.

That's banana. And it's like, and the only reason that he even got brought to justice at all, to him, is because he insulted a cop's ego or whatever. Right. saying like that's the only reason like his arrogance if he like it never would have happened otherwise and justice shouldn't change on shit like that the amount of nothing this cop would have otherwise done like he was just he was calling to file like just a just in case report about a guy bugging him they would have done nothing if he had insulted the cop this cop specifically had tried to be a real

cop but couldn't get on the force because he was too fat this is part of the story that's relevant to his ego. He had been working to lose weight to become a real cop while he worked as a college cop. So he was extra, like, hyped up to prove himself. This guy, fake bill just really walked into it here. He could have got away with this for the rest of his life. All right. Well, God bless fake bill. Real bill. God bless

Real Bill. God bless real bill. Fuck back. Fake bill. Forever. All right. Thank you guys for watching and supporting the show. We appreciate it. And, uh, yeah, that's it. See me on the road. Just real quick. Trey Crowder.com. That's all I'm going to say, though. Other than that, we'll see you next time. Love you. Bye.