Original subtitles

Oh.

I'm John Oliver. Thank you so much for joining us. It has been a busy week.

Zelensky and Netanyahu met with Trump. We saw the incredible headline, Cash

Patel loses lawsuit against man who called him googly-eyed chud, which I

think means that's his legal name now.

And this happened.

The chase for the squirrel is on and the squirrel is in the corner and the

squirrel is still eluding an entire horde of grounds crew members.

And the squirrel is free once again. Hemmed in. No, I won't be hemmed in. I

have freedom on my mind. Trying to go between the legs and eventually he gets

away again and hops through the towel and hops through another towel.

Okay, I think from now on, every baseball game should probably just be a

bunch of adults trying to trap a squirrel with a towel.

And credit to that announcer for narrating that like it was the Odyssey.

It takes vision to see a squirrel evading a ground screw and to shout, I

have freedom on my mind!

Sadly, that squirrel was eventually caught, but by the top of the eighth

inning, the Tigers mascot was holding up a sign saying, Free the squirrel!

Which is...

Excellent. And it's a sign that we might actually have to borrow soon if Bucky's

comes for our Mr.

Nutterbutter merch.

Still available, by the way, until it legally isn't.

Meanwhile, America's cyclospora outbreak continued to spread.

The CDC says four more states, Illinois, Kansas, Oklahoma, and Pennsylvania, are

linked to that spike in cyclosporiasis cases across a total of nine states

caused by shredded iceberg lettuce sourced by Taylor Farms. Nearly 2,000

people in those states got sick after eating the lettuce at Taco Bell, which

has removed all affected products.

But that is just a fraction of the record-breaking nearly 12,000 potential

cases of this parasite nationwide, and that number is expected to go up. So if

you're eating at a restaurant, it is recommended you ask the source of their

lettuce, or you eat cooked vegetables instead for now.

Yeah, the best advice we have for you right now is to basically play lettuce

detective at every restaurant.

really expecting them to say, oh shit, we actually get it from Sam's Parasite

Barn. We were hoping no one would ask. Because let's be honest, your server

doesn't know where the restaurant sources their lettuce.

Their main concern is that the bartender they fucked last week stopped working

Monday, and their manager won't release next month's schedule unless everyone

goes to a poetry night. So why not give them all a break and just order soup?

Now, if you haven't got cyclosporiasis, the symptoms...

are unpleasant to say the least.

It gives you, and I'm sorry to have to say this, debilitating explosive

diarrhea that can last for weeks. I wasn't feeling well. The pain in my

stomach was, like, unbearable. Immediately had to spread to the

bathroom. It was horrible.

The people saying, oh, I want to get the parasite, I want to lose weight.

No, you don't. Yeah, of course you don't.

Nobody should be looking at the people who pooped so weird that they made it

onto the news and think, should have been me.

An epidemiologist even described the symptoms as, it's uncontrollable and

it's very liquid. If you've seen pictures from cholera wars where the

patients are on gurneys and the gurney has a hole where your butt goes and

there's a bucket underneath the hole, it's very similar. And no offence, but I

don't think that epidemiologist should be allowed to give statements anymore.

We were looking for something like, it'll cause digestive issues. Not, Taco

Bell made American shit so hard and wet, they need assless beds like a 19th

century poop wall.

It is no wonder Taco Bell's business briefly dropped by nearly a third, and

the company has gone out of its way to try and reassure people.

We actually have a statement from Taco Bell that they put out not long ago

saying, we want you to hear it from us. We take your health and safety seriously

and have removed all affected Taylor Farms lettuce from Taco Bell stores.

So go ahead and enjoy your Taco Bell today.

You always got us. We always got you. See you in the drive through.

No, you fucking won't.

Truly no more efficient way to say that there is a nationwide diarrhoea epidemic

than the phrase, we have a statement from Taco Bell.

Because it's never going to be good news. It's never going to be, we have a

statement from Taco Bell. They found Amelia Earhart.

She's 129 and she's housing a crunch wrap. She just lost track of time.

But it's not just a notes app non-apology. To win customers back, Taco

Bell's even been offering $1 deals for certain menu items that don't contain

any lettuce, like this encharito, which looks like a murdered burrito dying in a

pool of its own blood.

And this Mexican pizza, which looks like a plate of nachos that studied abroad in

Rome for six months and now calls itself pizza. And look.

I will give Taco Bell credit for one thing. They proactively addressed this

problem. And to be fair, cyclospora is hard to track. And as we've talked about

before, the FDA has been underfunded for decades now.

But this second Trump administration has somehow managed to make a bad situation

significantly worse.

In President Trump's second term, the FDA has lost about 20% of its staff.

The CDC is down 25%. The CDC used to have 11 scientists.

tracking food parasites.

Now it's three.

Wait, only three people now?

That is clearly not enough. It really feels like we shouldn't be able to fit

the CDC's entire parasite tracking team comfortably onto a porch glider.

Look, as we have said before, a good public health system is one you don't

notice. A bad one makes headlines.

And boy, are we seeing that right now. And meanwhile, Secretary of Health and

Human Services, Robert Kennedy, or as his friends call him, has tried to

reassure people. But just the day after he claimed the cyclospora outbreak was

under control, the FDA announced it was investigating a new outbreak with cases

only growing since.

And look, clearly, none of this is ideal. And it does say something pretty

grim about America, that when it comes to acting swiftly...

to prevent a public health threat, the current government just lost the moral

high ground to fucking Taco Bell.

They seem to be in the mood to make amends to their customers right now. We

figured the very least that we could do is help them out.

Hey, America.

We at Taco Bell want you to know we care about your health and safety.

That's right. The inventors of fiery Doritos Locos Tacos care about your

physical well-being. So we're here to say we're sorry.

We're going to live con trito, which is how our chihuahua would say sorry if he

hadn't have died rushing the cockpit on 9-11.

We know that because of our food, many of you have been shitting your brains

out in a way that we never intended.

Because Taco Bell's always prided itself on two things.

Having the wettest food in America and only giving you the regular, normal

level of diarrhea.

That's why we temporarily removed lettuce from our food. So while you're

powering through our Mexican food-adjacent menu, including our, oh,

Jesus Christ, sausage, crunchwrap, supreme, you can feel confident that

you're avoiding one narrow definition of gastrointestinal disease. Again, we're

not promising you won't get regular diarrhea from this.

I mean, you've seen our food, right?

There's something on the menu called Diablo Dusted Chicken Nugget.

Okay? We're just saying.

We'll try not to give you the kind of diarrhea that'll put you on the news.

And if that's not enough, then frankly, that's on you, big guy, for eating

something called the Beastie Potato Loaded Griller. And you expected not to

shit your pants?

Taco Bell.

Where else are you going to go when you're drunk? Fucking Wendy?

Get the fuck out of here.

Moving on.

Our main story tonight concerns surveillance.

You know, the thing that this pervert does all year long.

He sees you when you're sleeping. He knows when you're jacking it to the

gilded age.

Specifically, we're going to look at police surveillance technology. It takes

many forms, from cameras to facial recognition to even this.

The robot itself was given the name HP RoboCop.

for Huntington Park.

It's, you know, rather a futuristic piece of equipment that essentially is a

sophisticated, current-time, high-definition camera system.

Please help keep the park clean. So initially, there was some negative sort

of reaction to the robot.

The robot was vandalized and it was tipped over.

Yeah, of course it was, because look at it.

It's a glorified Roomba that knocks. And did you hear its voice?

I don't think it was possible to create a dweebier robot than this virgin, but

enter stage left, the police egg.

It's got the body of a weeble and the voice of a hall monitor, and it's okay

for me to say that because... same.

The police...

Love using surveillance tech. And in recent years, the prevalence of local

mass surveillance systems has exploded thanks to cheaper technology and

increased funding from the federal government. And this all tends to get

presented as a boon to public safety.

Local news loves to cover cities' real-time crime centres. Here's a story

about one in Las Vegas. Here is one in Detroit.

And here's one in Cooper City, Florida. And in that story, the town's then-mayor

offered this upbeat assessment.

Everyone is being watched.

And if you're doing nothing wrong, it doesn't matter what you're doing.

But when you're doing something wrong, we're going to find out. We're going to

have the wherewithal to come and get you. We've got essentially Big Brother

on steroids.

Okay.

I'm not sure that's quite the spell he seems to think it is.

For one thing, Big Brother is pretty famously not the hero of 1984.

But the truth is, a lot of the technologies that feed into those

centres have significant problems, from civil liberties issues to the way that

more recently they've been weaponised to target immigrants. And it feels like

we're now at a point where there needs to be much more awareness of what is

actually out there. So given that, tonight, we thought we'd do something a

bit different and try to give you a field guide for some of the most common

surveillance tools, specifically cameras, microphones, licence plate

readers, cell site simulators, and the practice of predictive policing that

combines all of them to make that big... Big brother on steroids line, true in

all the worst ways.

And let's start with cameras. You've undoubtedly seen police surveillance

cameras all over the place, and the case for them is pretty simple. Here is a

police officer in New Orleans where cops have access to over 2,000 cameras

pitching the upside.

We had a shooting at this very intersection at 4.30 in the morning of

the gentleman that got shot, claimed to be the victim.

We watched the video surveillance, went back, and it showed that actually he was

actually shooting at the young man.

first so it kind of you know helped us exonerate the guy we were looking for

and if you didn't have the camera do you think you would have known the truth no

absolutely not really because if that's true that sounds less like an argument

for cameras than it is an argument against you because you basically just

admitted that we couldn't do dick all until we got them video doodads

But the thing is, police don't just use cameras to find evidence of something

that happened.

They can also use them to fish for crime that they think might.

essentially using them as a digital form of stop and frisk. Staying in New

Orleans, take the case of Michael Celestine, who police there accosted

after they watched him walking around in a puffy jacket.

You can see them zoom the camera in on him and track his movements for 15

minutes. And their justification for doing that is that they claim he had a

suspicious bulge in his jacket, which is already a weird thing to be on the

lookout for in a state which allows for concealed carry. But an even weirder

thing to do in the whole idea behind puffer jackets is that they bulge. It is

quite literal. the puff part.

Puffer jackets are essentially fashion bubble wrap. Babes, read a Vogue.

The police ultimately chased and then arrested and tased Celestine before

finding a weapon in his pants leg, only for the DA to ultimately drop all

charges. But because he happened to be out on parole, he wasn't allowed to make

bail and had to sit in jail for a year.

And it's worth noting that police aren't just limited to using their own

surveillance cameras.

Increasingly, they're able to use those owned by private businesses or

homeowners. There are an estimated 85 million in this country, and police now

routinely request access to them. In fact, here's an ad from one company that

facilitates that, Fusus, explaining to businesses how it works.

Setting up Fusus is fast, requires minimal hardware, and has no activation

fees. In an investigation, police can automatically request footage from all

nearby businesses at the click of a button.

And camera owners can securely share recorded as well as live video feeds to

aid in the investigation.

Yeah, it's that easy. With the click of a button, police can get access to hours

of private security footage. Look.

Technology has made a lot of things easy to do with a click of a button, like

order medicine, pay bills, or buy this inexplicable wall decal of a senior

woman with asthma, or one of that same woman wielding a frying pan as a weapon,

or a decal of Dr.

Phil as an M&M. Add all three to your cart, and now you've got a home worthy

of architectural digest.

Technology is amazing.

But it does feel like turning on the panopticon should be a bit harder than

that. And it doesn't stop there. Houston has gone so far as developing technology

that allows Amazon's ring doorbell to live stream straight to police crime

centres, which is a pretty wild use of something that I mainly associate with

bringing us videos of animals who just want to come inside.

Just for a minute, it's cold out here and you've got treats in there.

And while some businesses or homeowners might want to do that, in other places,

they're not given much of a choice.

Rialto, California, has made starting a business contingent on signing up with

Fusus, with permits containing language like, the security cameras shall be

accessible to the Rialto Police Department through Fusus. And come on!

Opening a small business is already hard enough. There's cash flow issues, hiring

and firing, and of course, dealing with Yelp reviews that say, woman at the

front desk had a weird eye, scared my son, he is nine!

But now, you also have to decide if opening your nail salon is worth being a

knock on passers-by.

But it's not just cameras being dotted all over the place, it's also

microphones, like the ones operated by a company called Shot...

It's used in over 200 jurisdictions. The way ShotSpotter works is it basically

sets up microphones all over a city which alert police if they sense a loud

noise that could be a gunshot. And some places treat ShotSpotter as highly

reliable. In Houston, their department doesn't dispatch officers for all 911

calls about gunfire, but they treat every ShotSpotter alert as a top

priority report. One officer even said no matter what other call you're on, if

a ShotSpotter alert drops, you go.

Unfortunately, the technology seems nowhere near as good as you'd want it to

be for that kind of response.

An AP investigation found the systems can miss live gunfire right under its

microphones or misclassify the sounds of fireworks as gunshots, while other

reportings found shots spotted being activated by cars backfiring or even

people using a nail gun, which is not good.

You don't want hyped-up cops showing up weapons-drawn because Dad finally got

around to putting up the Christmas lights.

And there have been cases of people searched and arrested for things like

drug possession simply because ShotSpotter sent police to their

location. So its inaccuracy can cause real problems.

And the evidence it actually prevents crime is scant. In fact, when a local

news team in Minneapolis looked into nearly two years' worth of results from

its ShotSpotter system, the results were dire.

The data reveals during that time, MPD responded to shot spotter activations

roughly 8,500 times.

The data also shows about 80% of the time, officers documented no evidence of

a gun-related crime. And only 32 activations total led to an arrest.

That's less than 1% of the time.

That percentage there is, that's insane.

That's crazy.

He's right.

It is crazy. And while this is not the point, I do think that man should be

asked to comment on literally every news story.

Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and his son monitor each other's porn

intake. That's crazy.

It is.

Reba McEntire partnered with 40 farms to make corn mazes out of her face.

That's crazy.

I agree.

Half a million Italians seek exorcisms every year.

That percentage there is... That's insane.

That's crazy.

My thoughts exactly.

The point is, it sure seems like a technology this flawed shouldn't be

dispatching police all over a city. And there is a similar issue with our next

technology, automated license plate readers, or ALPRs. You've probably seen

them by the side of the road. And cops will claim that they're a way to find

stolen cars or those engaged in suspicious activity.

The most popular are made by a company called Flop. And here is how they work.

Flock license plate readers don't just scan tags looking for stolen cars or

vehicles on a hot list.

The cameras take a photo of every car that passes, stamped with the precise

time and location.

The more cameras you pass, the clearer the picture of your movement. All of

that data is saved in a database for 30 days, shared with connected police

departments. Allowing the government to go back in time to see where your car

was and when. No warrant required, whether you're suspected of a crime or

not. Okay, first, the Oscar for cinematography goes to that news piece.

Drone shots, drive-in talks, and a license plate close-up that'll make

Tarantino buff both nuts?

Call the Academy, the race is officially over.

The point is, though...

ALPRs will send up a lot of alerts, but unfortunately, many are false alarms.

A randomized trial in Vallejo, California, found that 37% of all ALPR

hits from fixed readers, like those attached to a streetlight, and 35% from

mobile ALPRs, like those on cop cars, were misreads, which is an astonishingly

high error rate, and that has had real consequences.

Drivers have been repeatedly pulled over because a reader read the numbers on

their plates wrong and tagged the vehicles as stolen.

And some of those incidents have been truly hideous, like this one, where the

police wrongly assumed that a car full of children was stolen. I'll warn you,

this is hard to watch.

There's kids.

It's these cries and screams, Brittany Gilliam.

can't bring herself to relive.

That's terrifying.

As a parent, that's heartbreaking.

Gilliam says she was searching for an open nail salon while sitting in a

parking lot on Bucklet and Eyelift in Aurora.

And she's screaming like, hey, hey, auntie, the police.

When officers pulled up from behind.

They got their guns on us. They got their guns on us. Gilliam was in the SUV

with her six-year-old daughter.

12-year-old sister and two nieces, one 14, the other 17 years old. Police say a

license plate reader alerted them the SUV was stolen.

Yeah, that is obviously terrible. And you already know that the police fucked

up there. But I promise you are not ready for just how dumb that fuck up

was. It turns out the stolen vehicle was actually a motorcycle, not Gilliam's

SUV. Both vehicles share the plate number, but they were from different

states. Yeah.

It was a motorcycle from another state.

And the only thing that could be further from an SUV in Colorado would be if the

license actually belonged to a horse in Tennessee.

And look, so far, I've been focusing on when police technology gets stuff

actively wrong. But it is worth remembering, even when these systems

work perfectly, they can still be wildly invasive.

Cameras and license plate readers can track your movements.

wherever you go, which means they could find out if you, say, attended a protest

or visited an abortion clinic.

What's more, some companies like Flock make a feature out of the fact that

their databases can be accessed by not just your local police, but also by

those from other towns. And on top of all that, the federal government,

meaning agencies like ICE and Border Patrol, has been known to use this

network. Flock used to make arrangements with them to do so directly, but has

since discontinued that, though...

the government is still able to use the network through local law enforcement.

And while all of that is already comfortably bad enough, other

technologies can be even more invasive. Take cell site simulators. They are

devices with names like Stingray, and they allow cops to basically snoop on

any phone that is near them.

Here's how it works. Cell phones are always trying to connect to nearby cell

towers. A stingray acts like a cell tower decoy. In what's called a man-in

-the-middle attack, it tricks cell phones into thinking it's the nearest

cell tower, phones connect to the stingray, and police can access a range

of personal information.

But they don't just get intel on one phone.

Every phone nearby is forced to divert to the stingray.

Calls are passed on to a real cell tower.

Data scooped up stays with police.

Yeah, not great, right? I don't want a decoy cell tower getting any of my cell

phone data because what you do on your cell phone is your most personal of

business. Your laptop? That is for buying plane tickets or making an Excel

spreadsheet or browsing Civil War maps at the Library of Congress. You know,

business shit, but your cell phone.

That's for your most depraved behaviour.

That's for sexting or a photo of a rash you want to show your doctor. It's for a

phone note that just reads, young Gaddafi handsome, and some safe photos

that emphatically answer that question again and again. Good Lord, those things

need to go to the grave.

Cell site simulators are a mass surveillance tool, and police can get a

lot from them, from who you are calling to what you are texting.

And the thing is...

We don't know how often they do that, because generally, law enforcement keeps

a tight lid on its usage of these devices. In fact, for decades, the FBI's

imposed secrecy obligations on state and local agencies, making them sign NDAs to

prevent disclosure of any information about the devices to the public.

And some police departments have found some pretty creative ways to hide their

usage of these simulators. One in Florida advised officers when using data

obtained with them to just describe it as information from a confidential

source regarding the location of the suspect.

And if you think it right now, well, maybe cops need devices like these for

dire situations.

What if there's a kidnapping?

Or a bomb threat. You should know that is in no way all they get used for.

Because once cops get a new toy, they tend to find lots of excuses to use it.

In at least one instance, Stingray Tech was used to try and track down someone

who stole 15 chicken wings and three sub sandwiches. Look, if you do that, and

you get away so effectively, police have to use a high-tech cell site simulator

to find you. I think you've technically earned those fucking wings.

And look, I know...

I've already thrown a lot of programmes at you tonight, but it's important to

remember that they don't necessarily work in isolation.

They can all feed into real-time crime centres like the ones you saw earlier.

And some departments can then use all the data fed into them to engage in our

final and maybe dumbest use of this tech. It's called predictive policing.

basically using all that data to figure out which areas or individuals might be

likely sources of crime. Think Minority Report, but instead of three pale

orphans hanging out in goo, it's a bunch of bland-looking computers.

Santa Cruz was one of the first big cities to launch predictive policing,

back in 2011, after developing it with the help of a local university, and it

was promoted at the time like this.

Assistant professor of mathematics at the University of Santa Clara compares

this kind of repetitive crime to earthquakes. The initial crime is the

first tremor.

Subsequent crimes follow, like aftershocks.

What you might think of as after crimes, crimes triggered by an initial event.

And what we can do with this model is create maps, maps of when and where

police should direct their efforts.

We put that into the software program. It produces results in a very simple,

easy-to-use Google Map format that we can then provide to the officers to tell

them when and where to be on any given day.

Okay, so first, before you say anything, I know we all see it.

No need to dwell on it. He is pure sex.

Everyone agrees.

End of story.

Let it all out.

There was a lot of hype around what Santa Cruz did at the time. Time

magazine even called its predictive policing one of the 50 best new

inventions of 2011.

Along with, and this is true, the Boeing 787.

I guess it's true what they say. When you're at the top, there's simply no

place to go but up in flames.

And since then, other cities have rolled it out, including L.A., Atlanta,

Philadelphia, Chicago, and St. Louis. And some police departments have applied

predictive policing with the exact opposite of a light touch.

In Pasco County, Florida, the Sheriff's Department used it to compile a list of

top five offenders and other suspects, many of them teenagers.

based on arrest histories, unspecified intelligence, and arbitrary decisions by

police analysts.

Cops would then constantly visit and question those offenders about their

activities, filing reports with details like, of one kid on their list, he has

cut his hair, which is now short. He advised after the summer break, he'll be

going to ninth grade.

And he claims not to be associating with any of his old friends. And that is some

crackerjack police work right there, buddy.

This just in, local teen trying out new vibe this school year.

And see just how ridiculous this got.

Take the case of a kid called Rio, a 15-year-old boy who'd had one arrest for

stealing motorized bicycles with a friend. He'd been placed on probation

and had a probation officer checking up on him. But a year after he was

sentenced, the computer inexplicably placed him on that top five list.

And suddenly the police were constantly turning up to his house.

The Tampa Bay Times actually pulled body camera footage of those interactions and

it is just relentless.

Well, I'm on the tough side. I only have one charge.

It's not about your charge. It's about your... It goes deeper than that. It's

about your network who you associate with and our probation.

Okay, I don't have one charge. You have a lot of involvement in the history of

people that commit crimes. Well, I'll give it the good old knowledge knockers

when we have a chance to, like, sleep in here or some shit.

Sheriff's office.

You need wheel?

Yep. She's nice, I promise.

Hey, bro.

Just come and say hi to Rio.

Is he home? No, he's with his mom.

You need Rio?

Yeah. Officer wanted to talk to you, Rio.

We're just here to say hi to Rio. Hey, Rio, what's going on, buddy?

Might have a chit-chat for a couple minutes.

Happy New Year.

2020. Yeah, happy 2020.

It's going to be a great year.

But wait, because it gets even dumber. Another time the cops showed up and

demanded to see Rio, and when his sister said he wasn't home because he was with

his mom at her work.

Just watch as one deputy tried to bully his way into the house anyway.

So, you can let us walk through right now and make sure he's not here and in

compliance with his probation, or I can throw both of you guys a citation for

not having numbers on the house. What do you want to do? What does that even

mean? You don't have an address on either the mailbox or this house. Is

that a black mailbox? Yes, we do. We have our address on our mailbox right

now. On the other side.

That is pathetic.

Usually, when you hear the word cop... and blackmail you think of high-stakes

situations like infiltrating drug rings or corrupt gambling schemes not let me

see your teen or I'll find your mailbox to hell and look obviously cops can be

assholes no matter what but it definitely doesn't help to have a

computer program telling them you should absolutely go be an asshole to this

particular person because we think they're a criminal just waiting to

happen And it's worth pointing out that a lot of the technologies you've seen

tonight, like ShotSpotter and license plate readers, are disproportionately

used in communities of color. And cameras are often used in tandem with

facial recognition software, which, as we have discussed before, tends to

misidentify suspects far more often based on race. So there is already

racial bias built into many of these technologies.

And when you start feeding them into predictive policing, that only gets

compounded. And it frankly says something. There's a place that started

predictive policing. Santa Cruz actually backed away from it a few years ago for

exactly those reasons, as the police chief there explained.

The people who created it weren't inherently racist.

But the effect of it can be racist, and that's what we were concerned about.

Because if you're putting police officers in a location...

where they're likely to engage people in a negative way, then that becomes the

problem. Right.

And I know he's being very careful there, but luckily I can be a bit more

blunt. The people who created predictive policing that incorporated racist police

practices and data were probably inherently racist. A lot of people are,

either knowingly or not.

And the effect is definitely racist. It's just one of many uncomfortable

truths we should probably all be more upfront about, along with death comes

for all of us, people lie, and unfortunately, the goal of most dating

reality shows isn't to find love, it's to get enough Instagram followers so

that you can get a couple of brand deals and maybe one day start a skincare

company. It's just a regrettable fact.

And those who push all these tools will insist that the technology isn't the

problem here, it's how it gets used.

Flock, which makes many of those ALPRs I showed you earlier, has been branching

out into selling cameras and real-time crime centres to local departments. And

here is how a segment on one of them dealt with citizens' concerns.

Those eyes in the sky and on the roads raise concerns over privacy.

The ACLU has raised concerns with Flock's surveillance network, but Flock

says it's all about how you use it. As long as departments hire ethical people,

write sound policy and have oversight on those policies, then you can start to

ensure that this is all used ethically.

Okay, first, enough with the beard, we get it. But second, oh, it's that easy,

is it?

Just hire ethical people, write sound policy, and have oversight, and it will

all be fine. My brother in Christ, have you, and this is a technical term,

looked around recently?

Because as nice as that sounds, the fact is, departments don't necessarily do any

of those things.

There have now been many, many stories from around the country of police

officers accused of using ALPR databases to stalk and harass women.

As for oversight, well, flock...

claims that every search request is logged for accountability purposes. When

this man in Georgia tried to find out who'd accessed the cameras near his

home, his city told him it would cost him half a million dollars to fulfil his

request, which is clearly crazy.

Now, they did give him a much more limited data set, but interestingly, he

still found enough troubling new information in that to then take it to a

city council meeting.

Hunyar went to city council with the limited flock audit records Dunwoody

gave him. Nobody from flock safety is accessing your monitor and your footage.

Once again, I have evidence of flock employees looking at parks, schools,

playgrounds. The audit logs also showed flock executives watching private

cameras inside the city's Jewish community center, which the mayor

confirmed. Members of the flock sales team.

We're using it as a demonstration.

OK, hold on, hold on, because there is just a cascading set of yikes there.

First, you get the news that it's not just cops and security guards. Flock

employees are watching these cameras too. Then you get to parks, schools,

playgrounds, and a strolling list of cameras with labels like gymnastics and

gymnastics side view.

Then you learn they're at the Jewish community centre. And finally, that it

was for a sales demonstration.

What was even the pitch there?

Ever wonder what your Jewish neighbors were up to but didn't feel like going

over there to ask? Ever wonder what they look like doing yoga? Well, now you

don't have to. Why knock when you can flock?

And when a reporter asked a flock spokesperson about that, it didn't go

great. Why didn't flock find those vulnerabilities?

We actually can't talk about the JCPOA by name.

Why can't you talk about the JCC?

A Flock PR person stopped our interview twice when we tried to ask about Flock

employees viewing cameras inside the Jewish Community Center.

Did the people in those videos give permission to be part of a demo?

Partnership? I have to ask the question however you guys want to answer it. And

if you want to say you can't answer it, you can't answer it. That's fine. But I

have to ask the question.

I can't. It's not a PR video.

This isn't like a promotional video.

I think it's pretty clear we're not. It's not a PR video. We're good, though.

Yeah.

I'm not sure you're quite as good as you think you are there.

And I know it is hard for you to deal with cameras that you don't control, but

what did you think that news crew were going to do there? Leave that exchange

out? News stations fucking love it when someone tries to stop an interview. All

you've really done there is managed to look suspicious and to get them to break

out the good subtitles.

The fact is, it currently takes far too much pressure to expose what systems

cities are using and...

how they are using them. In fact, remember how I mentioned that Rialto,

California requires new businesses to hook their security cameras up to fuses?

Well, three years ago, we filed a narrow public records request with their police

department asking for emails in which fuses was discussed. They told us they

didn't have any, which seemed implausible.

So we filed a much broader request, and over the next two years, they sent us 28

pages, which still didn't seem like all the material they probably had.

So last February, we said, fuck it, send us an export of your whole log database

for users, showing us every time your officers peeked at a privately owned

camera. And we asked for it as a searchable digital file.

as the law requires.

But instead, what they did was send us a 30,413-page PDF.

To give you a sense of just how massive that is, if you printed it out, it is

all of this shit right here. Which was clearly pretty irritating, because it's

a huge amount of information that is impossible to look through quickly. Now,

thankfully, we managed to convert it into a searchable file, and in doing so,

we found something.

that it does feel the people of Rialto should probably know about.

For instance, this is just all the times police there access cameras at fast food

places. And you should know, some of those cameras are inside the restaurant

in areas only employees can access. For instance, it seems they can check in on

the grill at the local Wienerschnitzel any time they want.

And if you work at the Chick-fil-A there...

Just know that on one Tuesday afternoon, Rialto had five of your interior cameras

open for two hours straight. The front counter, the drive-thru register, the

multi-purpose room, the manager station, and the office. Which feels a little

weird to me, as does the fact that they access cameras at the Rialto Days Inn

for hundreds of hours, including the one facing the pool. And come on, getting

secretly watched in your swimsuit is not supposed to be one of the perks of

staying at a Days Inn.

You are supposed to get a room that is fine, a bed that will do, and a front

desk that occasionally has an employee behind it. That is the days in promise.

And I should say, the Rialto PD in six, some of those hit because they were

watching a whole area and scooping up all the cameras, or that they'd left a

set of cameras on in the background at their office. But that is just not as

reassuring as I think they want it to sound.

Look, it sure seems to me like these surveillance tools have much bigger

flaws than the people both selling and using them are comfortable admitting.

Because time and again, the pattern when they get rolled out is they get deployed

in secret and then publicly presented in the most positive light and only much

later do we start to fully understand the damage they can do. Basically, the

public conversation comes last, not first.

And the good news is, due in part to the vast overreach of the current

administration, we are now finally starting to have those conversations.

Around the country, people are showing up to demand their cities and towns end

contracts with companies like Flock, including a man in Seattle who did so

while dressed as an ALPR.

And while I admire his commitment to the cause, he does look more like what would

happen if a Pixar dad fucks the Pixar lamp. Because...

I think we'd all agree this is what would happen then.

But it is worth remembering, flock cameras are just one part of a vast

ecosystem here, and even if your town gets rid of them, cops might still be

looking at cameras in private businesses, or using thing rays, or

employing any of the other technologies you've seen tonight.

If you now want to know what's being used in your town, you can check out

resources like the EFF's Atlas of Surveillance, which catalogues...

each of the technologies used in your area. And I'll warn you, the answer

probably isn't going to make you happy.

Now, as for what to do about all this, experts say that to the extent we use

any of these technologies at all...

We at the very least need to make sure that they are thoroughly vetted and

debated before installation and mandate audits focused on civil rights, civil

liberties, privacy and racial justice risks to be conducted both before and

after a technology is adopted.

And that really doesn't seem like too much to ask.

Because the very fact that we don't already currently have all those

requirements in place is... What is the best phrase for me to use here?

That's insane.

That's crazy.

Yeah. It really is.

That's our show. Thank you so much for watching. We'll see you next week. Good

night.