New from Crooked Media: Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams

Stacey Abrams (0:00)

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Welcome to Assembly Required with Stacey Abrams from Crooked Media. I'm your host, Stacey Abrams.

As many of you know, I write political thrillers. In 2023, I published Rogue Justice, a cautionary tale about the vulnerability of the United States FISA Court, which is a real life secret federal court with the ability to surveil Americans without a public hearing. In the novel, this court, where only a handful of American politicians actually have oversight, I explored what would happen if the judges got blackmailed. Why? Because I write fiction based on fact, and I like to worry about the future.

Which is why I was so disturbed earlier this month when the Savannah Police Department fired six people, four sworn officers and two civilian employees. But they weren't terminated for a bad shooting, not for excessive force. What they did was disturbingly pedestrian. They typed names into a search bar. An internal audit found they had used the city's license plate camera system to look up family members and personal acquaintances, people they knew, people they wanted to keep track of. The problem is Savannah is not an outlier, and this is not an episode of Law and Order SVU. As of today, roughly 50 officers around this country have now been fired, charged or placed under investigation for doing the exact same thing. Now, most of them were caught doing what people would do if they had access to omnipresent cameras. They were looking up ex-partners, spouses, relatives. And those are only the ones that somebody caught.

As dangerous as this might be, what should terrify all of us is what this system does when it's working exactly as it's designed. In Johnson County, Texas, a sheriff's deputy ran a search across 6,809 camera networks, nearly 84,000 cameras and a full month of data. But this Texas sheriff was searching cameras in states nowhere near Texas. The sheriff told reporters he was performing a welfare check, and looking for a missing woman whose family was afraid she was going to bleed to death. But the audit log recorded what the deputy actually typed into the box, quote, had an abortion, search for female. Records obtained by 404 Media and the Electronic Frontier Foundation show the file was a death investigation into a non-viable fetus. A week later, the woman walked into that sheriff's office to report that her partner had choked her and held a gun to her head. But instead of protecting a battered woman, officers interviewed her about the abortion and read her text messages.

These officers of the law had no warrant. They hadn't gotten permission from a single judge. Instead, they weaponized 84,000 cameras to prove one woman's medical decision. And the only reason any of us know is that somebody pulled the audit log.

The company that built most of this is Flock Safety, found it right here in Atlanta. They've deployed more than 120,000 cameras across 49 states, surveilling over 6,000 communities. Now, Flock has claimed its system produces more than 20 billion plate scans a month. Here in Georgia, that data can be retained for up to two and a half years.