WIRED analyzed Flock Safety’s software by reviewing code delivered through the company’s login portal. When loaded, the files displayed user interfaces normally available only after a law enforcement user signs in. This allowed reporters to reconstruct parts of the authenticated applications—including prompts, search fields, investigative tools, and controls—without gaining access to the systems themselves. The code appeared to contain nearly everything needed to recreate the interface from scratch.
Before conducting a search, the Flock Safety platform can prompt an officer to provide probable cause. The code reviewed by WIRED indicates that officers are generally required to enter a reason for the search. However, the form does not appear to impose requirements on the reason’s content or length. If a police department also requires a case number, the software only checks whether the number contains at least three characters. WIRED could not determine whether Flock’s servers perform additional validation after the information is submitted.
WIRED shared its findings with Buchodi (a pseudonym), an independent security and privacy researcher who has spent more than a decade reverse engineering consumer software and surveillance technology. Buchodi independently examined Flock’s code and reproduced key parts of WIRED’s analysis.
The code reviewed by WIRED contained fixed references to Flock’s investigative tools, data the company may be able to access, and suggested prompts designed for law enforcement. However, the files cannot show how the system will behave during real-world use. They do not include the instructions sent directly to the AI model, nor do they reveal how Flock’s servers will process submitted requests, what responses they will return, or whether they will reject particular commands.
Flock has disclosed little publicly about the AI-powered tool. However, CEO Garrett Langley once compared it to a crime analyst who is, in his words, “always awake, always on the lookout.” During a demonstration for police chiefs in Denver last year, Langley spent less than a minute describing how the system could search cameras across a city for vehicles following armored trucks, identify the registered owners of those vehicles, and check their arrest records.
Langley has said that investigators who use the tool become “addicted.”
Founded in Atlanta, Flock Safety began with a camera built from a cellphone inside a waterproof box and now records roughly 20 billion license plate scans each month. Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, and other venture firms have invested heavily in the company, which was valued at $7.5 billion in its latest funding round. Flock’s original catchphrase was “the first public safety operating system to eliminate crime.” Langley recently spoke to Vanity Fair. He has also said Flock could have helped solve the disappearance of Savannah Guthrie’s mother, Nancy Guthrie, if a camera had been positioned where she vanished.
Flock Safety has approximately 140,000 monthly active users. At the company’s new Atlanta headquarters, a gold-painted camera commemorates an earlier tradition of adding a new camera each time revenue increased by $1 million. “We now do over a million jobs a day,” Langley recently told Vanity Fair.
Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, said a system like Flock’s was inevitable. “To use all the data collected, you need to build in the ability to query the data,” he said. “The system should be preprogrammed with natural-language prompts and automated workflows to make life easier for officers who do not intend to create their own investigative tools.”
Source: www.wired.com