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Posted on 08/29/2026 7:03:41 PM PDT by george76
Police using Flock Safety’s artificial intelligence tools can now track a vehicle based only on its location and movements.
Flock’s OS Investigate, formerly known as Nightshift, is an AI tool that identifies vehicles and ranks drivers’ “associates” based on how frequently they appear together at the same Flock camera, WIRED reported. Flock website code reviewed by WIRED listed 45 functions available to OS Investigate, including plate scans, camera metadata, arrest records, case files and 911 dispatch logs to identify potential suspects.
“[T]his [Flock tool] really crosses a line from a tool that’s used to investigate suspicious people to deciding who is suspicious,” Jay Stanley, senior policy analyst with the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy and Technology Project, told the Daily Caller News Foundation. “[I]t increases the chances that you are going to get put under the microscope by law enforcement because some algorithm thinks your driving patterns are ‘suspicious.'”
Stanley also believed the AI industry will shift toward models that organizations run in-house to combat privacy concerns.
“[A] lot of AI use is going to have to be local models,” he told the DCNF.
He believes homes and local institutions such as hospitals and police departments could soon have their own personal AI models for less powerful tasks as the technology advances.
“I think that’s the direction that a lot of organizations are going to go … I’ve talked to police officers who are like, ‘yeah, I want to use AI, but I can’t use AI in our internal stuff. We can’t let that leave the premises,'” Stanley told the DCNF.
Flock Safety, the Texas Municipal Police Association, the International Association of Chiefs of Police, Code Four Labs, Tyler Technologies and 3SI Security Systems each did not immediately respond to the DCNF’s request for comment.
For other critics, the real danger is how readily police may act on what this AI tool tells them.
“[L]aw enforcement have not right now been receiving in-depth training on how to challenge and question the findings of an LLM as to who the top 10 bad guys are in their jurisdiction, and they’re probably not going to wait around a long time to parse it all out carefully,” Alex Marthews, national chair of Restore The Fourth told the DCNF, explaining that this technology gives law enforcement the ability to outsource its decision-making.
If police departments have “the ability to say ‘okay surface for me, ChatGPT, the top 10 real goddamn asshole problems that there are in my jurisdiction,'” and the AI hallucinates, then they could arrest innocent people without due process, he told the DCNF.
He said Calvary Chapel San Jose kept holding indoor services in defiance of COVID mandates, and the government later used phone-location data to monitor who was there. Marthews argued that just as those worshipers did not anticipate technology to be “deployed against them,” the same could happen with these AI tools.
This flock system “can be targeted against anyone. Governments change, ideologies change, state enemies change, and we do not know in setting up a system that 10 years down the line we won’t be the targets of it,” he explained.
Flock CEO Garrett Langley has argued that Americans have to accept a compromise between safety and privacy.
“[W]hen people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they’re prioritizing the wrong thing. What we have to prioritize as a country is ‘compromise,'” Flock CEO Garrett Langley told Fox News in a Saturday interview, reposted by Sen. Rand Paul on X. “How do we have our safety, and how do we balance privacy.”
“[T]hat was not my comment. We believe in the constitution at Flock,” Langley said in another post, responding to the Senator. “I hope you can agree that Americans deserve to be safe.”
Flock describes its FlockOS platform, which hosts OS Investigate, as a command center that can operate anywhere, according to the company’s website.
“We watched the vehicles enter through LPR, tracked them across the city, and our teams were in place before the suspects even got out of their cars,” Major Patrick Krieg of the Dunwoody, Georgia, Police Department said, according to Flock’s website. “It was the first time we said: this platform is powerful.”
AI’s real value in investigations is managing the sheer volume of material a single case generates, George Cheng, CEO and co-founder of Code Four told the DCNF. Body camera footage, jail calls, phone extractions and call records can bury a detective and cases go cold for lack of time. Code Four’s INSIGHTS product pulls an open case’s records into one place and lets a detective question all of it in plain English, with every answer tracing back to its source.
Cheng drew a hard line between analyzing evidence in an already-open case and searching the public to generate suspects, arguing a search should start from the former. Beyond that, he said, outputs should cite their sources, an officer should own whatever the software drafts, an audit trail should preserve machine versus human work and agency data should never train outside AI models or be sold.
A policy analyst argued the problem with Flock’s tracking tools is how the government wields the technology.
“AI is simply a tool. It’s going to get utilized in many ways that are great, and it’ll get utilized in many ways that are bad,” James Czerniawski, head of emerging technology policy at Consumer Choice Center told the DCNF. “[B]ut we don’t regulate the tool itself, we regulate based on the outcome. In this case, the outcome is that you have people’s Fourth Amendment rights getting violated by the government, and there’s no good path to fixing that right now.”
Czerniawski pointed to one safeguard above all: warrants.
“‘Warrants’ is your best friend … for both law enforcement and for people’s due process consideration,” Czerniawski told the DCNF, arguing a warrant forces cops to justify AI-assisted searches.
“I think there needs to be legislation, both at the federal and state level,” Mayor of Knox County, Tennessee, Glenn Jacobs said in an August interview with the DCNF. “I think that as this issue becomes more prevalent around the country, Congress will take it up.”
One lawmaker is trying to write warrant requirement into federal law.
Rep. Keith Self: “The PRIVACY Act prohibits federal agencies from using output from applications such as Flock Safety’s OS Investigate without first obtaining a warrant,” Republican Texas Rep. Keith Self told the DCNF. “Flock Safety’s camera network is one of several emerging technologies that surveil everyday Americans, which requires Congress to implement processes to anticipate new technologies that must require warrants.”
Self’s proposed legislation would limit retention of data captured by these cameras to 30 days with a warrant, provided the information is not evidence for prosecution or a court grants an extension
“AI has supercharged the surveillance state, trampling our God-given right to be secure in our persons, houses, papers, and effects,” Self told the DCNF. “These cameras are no longer just license-plate readers looking for vehicles of interest; OS Investigate shows they are being used to aggregate an expanding amount of personal data, raising constitutional questions and putting individual privacy at risk.”
He called on Congress to act and impose restrictions on devices that surveil the public and infringe on Fourth Amendment rights.
Republican Missouri Sen. Josh Hawley began a Senate subcommittee investigation into Flock cameras on Wednesday, according to Hawley’s letter to Langley.
The Institute for Justice identified more than 100 cases of ALPR abuse, according to a database the group published Aug. 12. Among these cases was a Georgia police chief who conducted 600 searches to track his ex-girlfriend and her daughter, according to the Washington Post.
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UN Agenda 21 , 2030 , Great Reset, ( Let me know if you wish to be added or removed from the list.)
Is this intrusive data logging going to get me arrested for coasting [in gear..] down my local Hill?
When Hugo Parra was arrested last year on felony charges, his pleas of innocence fell on deaf ears.
A Flock license plate reader linked a San Diego man to a violent crime. He was five miles away.
Parra spent nearly one month behind bars, missing Thanksgiving and other special events with his family, before the assault with a firearm and evasion charges were dropped.
https://freerepublic.com/focus/f-chat/4383179/posts
Electric Eye - Judas Priest
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XylhU1-be1g
So they mark them as criminals for going to church.
If the hill is that big, then you should be able to see them coming when they attempt to serve the warrant! js...
“If the hill is that big, then you should be able to see them coming when they attempt to serve the warrant!”
Sure, but is it the hill you wish to die on?
even 40 years ago the bored cops pulled my friend and I over because we were going 34 down a hill on our 12 speed non motorized bicycles cause he had to go “over 50mph” to catch us.
oh and yes it was one of the first fully surveilled communities in the USA.
and yes the cops harassed every single person they could, one even ticketed Bill Gates for not having “proof of financial responsibility” although I laughed after he fired soon after. and yes Gates got off on a technicality.
Previous stories on this topic reminded me of the song ‘Hey Big Brother’. Until a few days ago, it had probably been over 50 years since I last listened to it. It came out my senior HS year (71-72).
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=-c0F2nw7ukk&pp=ygUhUmFyZSBlYXJ0aCBoZXkgYmlnIGJyb3RoZXIgbHlyaWNz
See if your license plate was scanned.
Warning, based on Flock reported scanned license plates.
As adults later in life when family got together we used to sit around the table after meals and shoot the breeze with the ‘remember that time?’ stories... My father, the late freeper BBPark, told us one once about him and his buddies used to get “Jazzed up” and go crash weddings... “Man we used to get all sauced up and then run out to the boat marinas and hot wire one and go out cruising for the rest of the night!!”...
I staring at him with my mouth open in awe... He looked at me and said. “What??” I said ‘I Can’t believe you used to whip my ass for things like throwing snowballs at cars or peoples garage doors!!’...
Dad looked at me, pointed and said...”You got caught!!” man the whole table busted up laughing... But then he confided that it was a different era... if he and his buddies got caught they would have gotten the asses whipped by the neighborhood or the cops but no record. etc...
Good times...
I watch for popo cars as I descend.
Flock cameras and such could easily get me without my knowledge.
I’ll have to survey that local ‘hood a bit closer.
I’m generally busy making sure that I don’t impact anybody or vice versa….
Wake me when so brings the cost of EVERYTHING down
They will shut us all down from speaking the truth at some point. Keep telling them the truth SaveFerris. I don’t believe we have much time left. I pray to be wrong.
[They will shut us all down from
speaking the Truth at some point]
Indeed they will
I’m trying to inform others.
Sometimes reaching amazing numbers thanks to
FReepers and Lurkers who are SHARING,
perhaps even Internationally 🌏🌍🌎.
We’re in the 11th Hour
Thank you and please keep those prayers coming!
🙏🙏🙏
God bless you
✝️✝️✝️
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