How Flock Cameras Took Over America

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
If you like YouTube, you'll love YouTube Premium. Hi, Sean Evans from Hot Ones here. With YouTube Premium, I get ad-free videos, offline downloads, background play and so much more. Try YouTube Premium for two months free at youtube.com/premium. Trial eligibility varies, terms apply, cancel any time.

**SPEAKER_2** (0:16)
Let's get the section out of the way.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:18)
Above the furthest most, see it up there?

**SPEAKER_1** (0:21)
Yeah. That's one of them.
Interesting.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:26)
From The New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:31)
There's one over there too.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:32)
Yeah. I guess once you start to see them, you just start to see them.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:36)
I guess I've never paid that much attention to it. You will be aware of them after today.

**Rachel Abrams** (0:45)
Earlier this summer, my Times colleague, Fernando Alfonso, got in a car with a man named Philip. He didn't want us to use his last name.
They drove around the suburban streets of Dallas, searching for traffic cameras.

**SPEAKER_1** (0:58)
You see the white pole up there?
There's a camera kind of sticking down flat. That's one.

**Garrett Langley** (1:04)
That's one.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:05)
They were on the lookout, not for a red light camera or a speed trap camera, but something totally different. An automatic license plate reader, made by a company called Flock.

**SPEAKER_3** (1:16)
And that's a flock?

**SPEAKER_5** (1:17)
That is a flock. Okay. Yeah.

**Rachel Abrams** (1:19)
Law enforcement agencies say that these cameras are essential in fighting crime. But Philip and people like him, who have identified the locations of 100,000 flock cameras all over the country, see them as something else. The beginnings of a surveillance state. Today, I speak to my colleague Kashmir Hill about the company behind the cameras and the mounting backlash against them. It's Monday, August 31st.
Kashmir Hill, welcome back to The Daily.

**Kashmir Hill** (2:01)
Good to be here.

**Rachel Abrams** (2:02)
So, Kash, you've covered so many different types of surveillance at this point. I know a lot of Americans are aware that they are being watched in sort of one form or another, whether it's online or in public spaces. So can you just start off by explaining what is so different about this particular kind of surveillance and why it's prompted people to finally say like enough is enough?

**Kashmir Hill** (2:23)
So these are cameras that take photos of cars and read their license plates. If you start looking around as you're driving, you might see them on a pole by the road, solar panel, camera looking down your way. They're in places where people maybe aren't used to being surveilled. They're in rural roads, just in communities that don't necessarily have a lot of other cameras around.
Also, people do have this kind of privacy attachment to their cars. And so I think Americans kind of think of your car as this kind of symbol of freedom, this thing you can get away from everyone, but now you can't because there are going to be cameras tracking it.
And so my colleague Fernando Alfonso and I found that people were just getting really upset about these cameras. And it was a level of uproar over privacy that I haven't seen before, or at least haven't seen in a very long time.

**Rachel Abrams** (3:23)
So what is the camera capturing exactly, just the license plate, or is it something more complicated than that? Because on its base, a license plate reader that sort of sounds a bit benign.

**Kashmir Hill** (3:32)
Yeah, so the cameras take photos of cars as they pass. They get the license plate, but you can also use a system to search other things, like the color of the car, the make of the car, whether it has a bumper sticker or visible damage or a toolbox on the back. And this gives police more visibility into our movements than they've ever had before. This company called Flock is the industry leader. They're kind of the name that everybody knows because they're the biggest. Flock alone has 120,000 of these cameras across the country in every state but Alaska.
7,000 law enforcement agencies have contracts with Flock, which is about 40% of all law enforcement in the country.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:18)
Okay, so a lot. Very ubiquitous.

**Kashmir Hill** (4:20)
A lot. They have really achieved market penetration quickly. They only started working with police in 2020 And the company is now valued over $8 billion.

**Rachel Abrams** (4:31)
Wow. Okay. So $8 billion, 40% of police departments. Let's talk about the company for a minute. How did its cameras get everywhere so quickly?

**Kashmir Hill** (4:39)