本·乔丹谈Flock、隐私和新的监控强烈反对

Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.

But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating Flock Safety, the maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.

Benn recently testified in front of Congress, at a hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held, dedicated to Flock and other ALPR systems. This hearing felt like the culmination of months and months of growing criticism and bipartisan backlash against Flock — all of which is taking a shape similar to the pushback against AI data centers.

This has led to major fallout for Flock. Hundreds of cities, counties, and other local governments have begun canceling contracts, and Flock is now under investigation by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Last week, Reuters reported that Flock plans to cut about 18 percent of its workforce.

So of course I wanted to dig into all of that with Benn, not just because he played a role in that, but because he’s also become in some ways the face of a new front in the broader debate about surveillance and privacy.

A point you’ll hear Benn make is that he doesn’t actually hate Flock as a company — he thinks its posture toward critics has been a colossal PR failure that made it low-hanging fruit, while competitors like Axon and Motorola quietly build the same kind of networks. Instead, Benn now talks to Flock directly, including to its CEO Garrett Langley, and reports security vulnerabilities to the company when he finds them. (As a side note: we have also invited Flock’s CEO on the show; Garrett if you’re listening, we would love to have you.)

Benn says his outreach to the company is an olive branch he’s extended to Flock as part of his goal of working toward real, tangible solutions to surveillance overreach, rather than part of a crusade to tear one single company down.

That’s a real theme throughout our conversation: that Flock and other high profile names in surveillance are just part of the problem — our real focus should be on the interlocking relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency.

We never voted for an insecure network of cameras on every street corner, and we’re certainly not being asked if we’re comfortable with access to this network being given to police officers with a penchant for abusing it. So Benn sees his work on YouTube and with other researchers, civil rights groups, and journalists as an accountability function that forces this conversation to the forefront. And so far, it’s working.

Okay: Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Benn Jordan, you’re a musician, YouTuber, and researcher. Lately you’ve been an investigative journalist. You are a witness in Senate hearings. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I’m a huge fan of yours. It’s just a delight to have you here. A lot of people in the Verge audience know you as a musician, but lately you have been relentlessly focused on Flock cameras, which are automatic license-plate readers (ALPRs). You recently testified in front of a Senate hearing on those cameras and the surveillance they enable.

Give us a sense of your background. For people who don’t know you or haven’t been following you for years, where did Benn Jordan come from and how did you end up being the person who makes videos about Flock?

I’ve been a musician my entire life, pretty much. I’ve also always been kind of a hacker, or somebody who is that type of person who always takes stuff apart. If I get a product that wants me to pay for a service that’s already in the product, then that’s a puzzle I want to solve and I get excited about it. But a lot of times that blends into investigative journalism as well.

With the Flock stuff, it’s just that I live in Atlanta, which has more Flock cameras than anywhere else per square mile. About two years ago I started noticing them. I thought they were traffic cameras or something like that. Then I started looking into what they were actually doing and then started looking into things like security vulnerabilities. More than anything, everything that’s happening right now in the public, in the news, has to do with people just figuring out that these have existed the entire time.

A lot of my focus now is on the lack of transparency from the government, because the companies are always going to make money and try to make as much money as they can, especially if it’s from taxpayer money. But in this case, I feel like our government missed it. And that’s where we’re at.

There’s a question that’s been rattling around my head the entire time we’ve been having what I would call the modern privacy and surveillance debate.

When I say “modern,” what I mean is it feels like we woke up sometime in the last year and everything is recording us all the time and everything is watching us and the glasses have cameras in them and Mark Zuckerberg is saying phones don’t have a light, and that is meant to end a conversation.

That’s it. That’s the argument. Phones don’t have a light, no further questions. The Apple Watch is going to start doing automatic transcriptions, and everyone said, “Wait, hold on. No thank you. We actually don’t want this to happen.” But my personal experience of this is that my political coming of age was the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

This is the stuff that people were talking about twenty-five years ago — don’t do warrantless wiretaps, don’t make the databases all connect to each other so you can take the metadata and de-anonymize people at will.

What is it about this time that has made everybody so angry? Because we could have been angry twenty-five years ago.

I’m always trying to get people more informed on the information that’s being collected about them every time they go to a website, every time they sign up for something, every time they check into a restaurant online, every time they use their phone. In this case, one of the reasons that people are really upset about is that you can’t opt out. That’s the first thing.

I can’t say, “I don’t want these Flock cameras or Axon cameras or whatever they are tracking my every move and giving it to law enforcement.” I have no option to do that. I was never given an option on whether to vote for them or vote for somebody who was in favor of them. It just kind of happened and you know people weren’t told about them. That would be the first thing — that you can still install a separate OS on an Android phone or you could turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or just leave your phone at home. Whereas now you can’t actually go to the grocery store without somebody tracking your vehicle.

The second thing is that — and this is kind of related to opting in and opting out — I can pay for a new AI smartwatch or I can pay for an Amazon Echo device or something like that, or I cannot. Whereas this way I’m paying for this already. This is just my property taxes going up and I’m paying for surveillance.

In some ways it is the same as the NSA, but I feel like it’s much more local now.

You don’t get to go to the town board meeting and yell at the NSA. Although maybe you should. Honestly, that might be good for everyone. There is that part of it, and you’ve certainly been at a bunch of local town board meetings. I’ve watched a lot of videos of you talking to them and helping other people articulate their concerns.

That, to me, is one of the more fascinating aspects of all this. Flock went from a company that was selling cameras to everyone, and the idea that adding Flock cameras would increase the safety of your town went from all but assumed to, “Hold on, we all have a lot of questions,” and now this company is struggling a little bit. They’re losing contracts, they are retrenching, their communication strategy has changed.

What do you make of that? Is that just the power of local democracy in action, or is there something else?

It definitely is democracy in action. That’s the good news. The best news out of anything that’s happened is that with both Flock and data centers, it’s two things that have made people actually look up who their mayor is and who their city council members are and show up to meetings and then get involved in those local politics.

Because those local politics affect your life way more than national politics. They just don’t make the headlines. We’re not as involved. Your day-to-day following what Donald Trump is doing is likely not going to make that big of a difference other than what you argue about over Thanksgiving. Whereas local politics, that’s straight up, in the next year, going to have a big effect on your life.

People are getting involved in that, and then in cases like Asheville, North Carolina, where it’s actually changing the political landscape. People are so dissatisfied with the surveillance policies of their local politicians that it looks like that they may have a new mayor as a result of it, who also comes with a bunch of other interesting and progressive ideas that would probably help the city a lot more than the current mayor has.

That’s a big deal right there. The other part that discourages me a little bit, or the part that I find a little disappointing, is that Flock has become this buzzword, but a lot of people don’t look beyond that. I just heard in the race for governor in Georgia that the Democratic candidate yesterday talked about getting rid of Flock cameras and being anti-Flock, when this is somebody who as mayor of Atlanta welcomed Flock. You see a lot of that happening now, too, where they just say “Flock bad” and then they go sign an Axon contract or they put Verkada or Motorola cameras everywhere.

In my research, Flock has been the low-hanging fruit, just because they were the loudest and most defensive, whereas every other company was just taking a step back and cashing the checks.

One of the pieces of the puzzle here that is just fascinating is that Flock is a startup, essentially. They’re a new company, they have a new go-to-market strategy. They talk a big game about what AI can and can’t do and with what they as a platform should and should not enable. Your Axons and your Motorolas are government contractors. They are not companies that are meant to have a personality.

There’s something about Flock where Garrett Langley, the CEO, had a personality. He would go on TV and deride any critics as left-wing terrorists and that did not work. There’s something about surveillance in that case where that strategy didn’t work. There’s something about data centers where that strategy didn’t work.

We just ran a big piece about the people of Utah pushing back on Kevin O’Leary, who called them all Chinese agents, and they were like, “What are you talking about?” That cut across party lines. Again, you’ve been out there. I know you’ve talked to a lot of people pushing back on surveillance.

Is it just that Flock had a personality, and that enabled bipartisan pushback? Or is it surveillance more generally?

In terms of the media getting attention, Flock had a lot of personality and they were very defensive. I’ve met a lot of the people from Flock who are so villainized and they don’t seem at all the way that they’ve seemed in the clips that I’ve covered in my content. It’s very different. You would assume that there’s a publicist behind a lot of this.

Especially in something that serves law enforcement, where you would maybe have a publicist that’s used to dealing with Republicans and right-wing things, they just tell you to keep repeating the same thing over and over again and take a firm stance and dig your heels in. Most people who aren’t Donald Trump, when they do that, get wrecked. Flock got wrecked. They kept saying things and they kept denying security vulnerabilities and they used clever ways of reframing or redefining words and people picked up on it and now they are the villain.

Whereas companies like Axon are not as sexy for a journalist. They just aren’t, and that’s probably intentional on their part. Any company that’s taking your tax dollars or trying to court your government to give your tax dollars to them probably wants to be out of the spotlight.

We’ve covered Axon before. They do not want to be a company with characters. They are as anonymous as they can be.

One of the things that I want to see with you on the show, most importantly of all, is to describe what a Flock camera is and what the technology behind the hardware does that makes it new.

Because from watching all the videos that you make, I think, “It’s just an Android phone. They’re just putting a bunch of Android phones around town,” but it’s actually the database and the AI that makes it more dangerous than usual. Describe what the actual Flock hardware is and then how that connects to the system that makes it as controversial as it is.

So ALPRs have existed, I believe, since the 1970s. They started getting used in the United States in the late 80s and 90s. One of the classic ways that they would be used in the 2000s is they would be mounted on a police car. If a police car wanted to run someone’s plate, that way they didn’t have to type it in while they’re driving, and they could run a plate over to dispatch. I personally don’t have any problem with that. I think that makes sense. That’s a decent use. However, you would have issues where you would get plate misreads and then people would get taken out of their car at gunpoint as a result.

Flock is a lot different. Flock basically started a private nationwide network where any police department or city that’s using Flock’s network can opt into it and share their data with it. Police departments across the country can then run a license plate with 30 days of retention on everywhere someone’s been, anywhere in the country, as long as they’re sharing the data. So you would have someone in Texas being able to search somebody’s movement through New York or Atlanta or something like that.

They were doing this — they are doing this — without a warrant. Whereas any type of ALPR data sharing previous to Flock had to go through the National Crime Information Center, which does require a magistrate judge to look at the overall context of a situation and then issue a warrant to allow tracking.

That’s the innovation here. They built the private network, the private database, and convinced a bunch of law enforcement agencies to buy their system and they could opt in. There’s some kind of legal innovation here where by making it a private database, they could just excuse themselves from the warrant process.

But the actual hardware of the cameras is not all that impressive. There’s something about that that I really just want to hone in on. The idea of the Flock camera being the problem is secondary to the Flock network being the problem.

One way that I think about it, in the defense of Flock cameras and even outside of Flock itself, is that it’s all hap