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That's a good thing.

Good afternoon and welcome to the city of Cleveland, where we are devoted to creating conversations of consequence that help democracy thrive.

It's Friday, July 10th, and I'm Nick Castele, the government reporter with Signal Cleveland and the moderator of today's panel.

This conversation is the David Ralph Hertz Memorial Forum on Civil Liberties.

And we are discussing the future of AI powered surveillance.

Thanks for reporting from cleveland.com, who I see in the back.

We know there are more than 1700 license plate readers here in Cuyahoga County, most of them provided by Flock Safety.

This is they're part of a system that recognizes license plate numbers, identifying features of vehicles, and collects them in a database for law enforcement.

Proponents say this is the next generation of safety technology.

Part of the effort to solve crime and bring justice to victims.

Opponents cite concerns about privacy, data, security abuses of data, and the sharing of information with federal law enforcement in the Trump administration.

Our conversation this afternoon comes, as you probably know, just after Cleveland City Council's safety committee reversed itself and keeping the city's 100 flock license plate readers online.

A final vote on a contract extension is expected next week.

Nearly every state in the nation has some form of AI powered surveillance, and broadly speaking, you can include acoustic surveillance technology like ShotSpotter in that category.

This next generation of AI technology, though, has been met with skepticism and concern.

Combined with political tensions, the conversation in many American communities is not just about whether this technology works, but also whether it should even be allowed in its current form or at all.

Today, we're going to dig into the evolution, ethics and future of AI powered surveillance across the nation.

And joining me on stage is Doctor Jen Golbeck, professor of the at the College of Information at the University of Maryland.

Doctor Golbeck is a computer scientist, AI ethics and privacy expert.

She's a sought after speaker on the future of AI and its impact on people, and is a frequent guest on NPR and talk radio and a guest contributor for multiple publications, including Esquire and The Huffington Post.

Also with us is Joshua Thomas, the chief communications officer of Flock Safety, a public safety technology company that provides AI powered cameras and license plate readers.

And the company, of course, whose contract hangs in the balance before Cleveland City Council next week.

Before we begin, a reminder for our live stream and radio audience.

If you do have a question during the Q&A portion of the forum, you can text it to (330)541-5794, and City Club staff will try to work it into the program.

Now, members and friends of the City Club of Cleveland, please join us in welcoming our panelists to the stage.

I want to start this conversation with a quote from a federal judge here in the Northern District of Ohio, who had a case before him that had to do with license plate reader technology.

He upheld the use of license plate readers in the case.

But as other federal judges have, he said, there may come a day where this technology goes too far.

And what he said was this.

On the one hand, a car's license plate and exterior appearance belong to a category of vehicle related identification in which an individual has no reasonable privacy interest.

On the other hand, the ability to track drivers continuously and retroactively raises the specter of a surveillance state.

Josh, let me ask you, our LPR and other similar tools.

Part of the surveillance state, I think they certainly could be.

So I guess what I would say is that, like my point of view on this might be different than your point of view or yours, doctor, or any people in the room.

And clearly some people here disagree.

But what I would tell you is that my point of view is that, yes, license plate readers are going to be part of our city infrastructure.

Cameras will be, drones will be this infrastructure exists today and it will exist.

If it's not flock, it'll be somebody else.

You can talk to command staff over here at this table.

They're using a ton of technology today.

Every city in America will eventually be using some of this technology.

The question I have is not will it be used?

The question is, how do we have it be used in accordance with our values?

And by our I mean whatever it is locally, locally, here in Cleveland, it should be used and dictated by people who live here.

So my point of view on this generally is this technology can exist.

It has to exist.

It provides an incredible public benefit, but it needs to be done in a way that's responsible with people's local values.

And that, I think, is where we should debate the conversation.

And I want to get into a little bit some more of that, that sort of local versus national tension.

But Jen, I wanted to ask if you could respond to the other side of that question here, which is and for those who maybe aren't familiar, of course, flock license plate readers are all around the city, and they are capturing images of your car as you pass by them.

This idea that your car, its exterior, its appearance, you don't have a privacy interest in that.

It's on the public roadway.

Anyone can see it.

I mean, why would there be privacy concerns then with something like flock?

So I think it's true, right?

I agree with this, that like if you're driving around in public what your car looks like, what your license plate looks like, anybody can take a picture of that.

Write it down.

You don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy for that, but it is an entirely different animal.

When every car, every license plate is tracked and recorded and put into a database that can be accessed not just by local police, not just by the police here in Cleveland, but by police around the country.

And I think if you look at the numbers in a lot of jurisdictions, most of the queries for that flock data are coming from outside, not just from locally.

And I think part of the discussion and the worry with this is that our protections about our privacy come from where do we have a reasonable expectation of privacy?

And if we say, okay, my car sitting out there, you guys saw it, you took a picture of it.

I don't have an expectation of privacy.

Thus we can also have every single one record it at all these locations and put in this national database.

And that's the same thing.

We erode what a reasonable expectation of privacy is, and that allows us to continually go further down a path towards an all encompassing surveillance state, where lots of things where now we would say never that will we inch ourselves towards.

Or this I would say, is a big step towards eroding what a reasonable expectation of privacy is because it's different.

It's different if you put it in a big database versus one person.

Well, that's what I would also challenge you on.

A little bit darker is that you had you made this, you made this sound like this.

It's inevitable that there will be a sensor in every corner and that the entirety of your life will be recorded.

First of all, let me just challenge this premise.

You talked about this a little bit earlier.

You have an Instagram account for your dogs or a Snapchat account that has millions of followers.

You're posting all the time to the world locations and photographs of every place you go.

Half of us in the room probably do that, are posting our photo and our location everywhere we go to the world.

License plate readers today delete the images on a regular basis, and we can twist that dial in the city of Cleveland.

You could adjust that and say, I don't want these images to exist beyond 30 days.

Beyond seven days.

A lot of states have regulated that information.

That's what I would say if we do approach this world, which, by the way, no one has defined what that looks like to have too many sensors in the world.

But I agree with you.

There is an inevitability with this.

That is, there could be too many centers in the world that could track the whole of your movements.

It hasn't yet, as this federal judge talked about, as has been tried in more than 40 courts asking the same question, does this track the whole of your movements today?

It does not, at least with flock today.

We do not do that.

It has been tried many times, but what I would say is, as we approach those lines, yes, we should then decide how do we regulate that stuff?

Do we have fewer sensors?

Well, if they're solving kidnapings and murders, we want to be able to give law enforcement the objective evidence for that.

But are we holding on to it for too long?

Maybe.

Is it being shared out of places, as you said, doctor, that it shouldn't be shared?

Okay.

The city owns the data and the controls around that.

So the city gets the opportunity to regulate that.

It's not a private companies job.

There's a couple things I want to ask you about, Jen.

Maybe you want to respond to that and then ask some other questions.

Sure.

But go ahead.

Then we'll move on to so many things.

So first, I mean, I think at this point about social media.

So like, yes, my my dogs are very famous on social media.

I make incredibly intentional choices about what I share, and I have the right to choose what I share there and what I don't.

That's entirely different from me driving down the street, right?

You see people who pass for cameras on their way to the grocery store.

So you may not be tracking every single GPS ping every three seconds, but people can be tracked in their regular movements and they don't have a choice.

Where I do have a choice with social media, I think that's a very big difference.

I think our conversation will probably get to the points that you are making about you want to solve crimes, and we want to give police the tools for that.

I don't want to preempt your questions on that.

Well, let me ask actually, just as a table setting thing, first of all, for you, Josh, a couple of things that I'm curious about is this one point about the ownership of the data.

These cameras are taking lots and lots and lots of pictures all the time nonstop.

That's a lot of data to store.

Sure.

Say in a city like Cleveland, where is that data stored on web services?

Government cloud.

Government cloud.

Okay.

And so is that are those would that be through, say, a flat contract with Amazon Web Services or is that right?

We are the custodian of the data.

So yes, we have a contract with Amazon Web Services.

Yes.

And the data is stored there.

We can't access it without the city's permission.

Sure.

So we say the city owns the data, but where the data lives is owned by Amazon but sort of leased by you.

Where it lives is owned by Amazon, correct?

Yes.

Okay.

The way data centers often work is you don't just save it in one place, you want to have redundancies.

It's got to be saved in multiple locations in case you have a failure, you don't lose your data.

How can a consumer, a member of the public, be sure that when we say this data is deleted every 30 days, that it is not still backed up somewhere else on a redundant system?

So Amazon has actually explained this.

They've produced a white paper explaining exactly how they do that.

I'm not technical enough to know that your computer scientist doctor, maybe you could explain it better than I could, but what I'd say is I would show you the letter that they have written that explains a technical detail, how they assure you that it's deleted every 30 days on a rolling basis.

So I could give that to you and we could look at it together.

Okay.

One other thing is, can you explain how AI is actually used in this whole process?

As I understand it, AI is recognizing not just a license plate, but distinguishing features on a video.

The case I mentioned before they did the police ATF actually who first did the search, they did not have the license plate, but they knew there was a bumper sticker.

They knew the make in the model, the color of the car, and based just on that information, they were able to search the flock system and come up with a hit.

What else is AI doing?

So machine learning what you're describing is a is a body of AI, and you should explain this probably better than I should, but what we're using is a branch of that called machine learning.

And effectively what you're doing with machine learning is you present a lot of the same information to the machines, and then you have it recognize what it is seeing.

So effectively, I could show it a thousand gray shirts and then a thousand red shirts.

And you're trying to have it learn.

What does gray mean versus what does red mean.

That's like the general basis of what we're doing here.

Same thing through with license plates.

Show them what the character A looks like a lot of times until the machine understands it has learned to recognize the character a so one of it is called optical character recognition ABC 123 and a license plate.

Those are alphanumeric characters.

We're trying to understand and ensure that we see a B versus an eight.

That's an important distinction to be accurate about on a license plate.

But moreover, an additional thing is on the colors of vehicles.

Yes, we're training the models to understand the make of a vehicle.

Does it have a roof rack?

Does it have aftermarket wheels?

Is there a bike attached to it?

And the reason is, is because most of us in this room are not law enforcement.

And if we are the eyewitness to a crime, how are we going to describe what we see?

We're going to use plain English and we're going to say, oh, it was a blue Jeep that drove off, and I think it had a bike attached to it or whatever.

We're not going to say probably, oh, it was an Ohio plate.

And it was it said.

ABC one two, three or we're not going to be able to recognize that probably in those moments, but we could probably give a description of a vehicle.

So the model has been trained to recognize that.

So what you can do as a user of the system is taking eyewitness report.

It was a blue Jeep with a bike.

You put that into the system.

And instead of law enforcement going the old way of policing and they might have to stop every blue jeep in the vicinity and create unwanted interactions with law enforcement.

Instead, they get precision.

They go for just the one suspect vehicle in the area during that time period.

That helps them narrow it down so they are only stopping potentially suspect precision.

But that starts with a very wide funnel of anybody who's driving.

Well, that's exactly what's the alternative.

You start with a very wide funnel of anybody who's alive.

And so what computers can help you do is narrow it down and become more precise.

Well, Jen, I want to ask you something.

This is something I think you actually mentioned as we were sort of preparing for this panel.

And forgive me if I'm not quoting you accurately here.

You said something along the lines of, you see this kind of high powered surveillance as being incompatible with democracy.

Could you explain what you meant by that?

Yeah.

I mean, we have a right to protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

And what we've seen in Supreme Court cases, we haven't had flocks specifically in front of the Supreme Court yet, but we've seen that location information is something that as soon as as recently as what, two weeks ago, the Supreme Court has ruled like this is something that people have protection over, right?

It's something that you would want to warrant to have.

And I think part of this broad AI enabled surveillance, not just flock, but this entire ecosystem, is that we have private companies collecting data that the police, if they were to do that same thing, might need a warrant for.

Right?

It depends on on what data we're talking about.

But we see regularly in this surveillance ecosystem that authorities are going around the need for a warrant and buying data from private companies.

It's circumvents these protections.

Right.

So if we look not to put you on the spot for this one, but if we look, for example, at FISA, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, so this is the government surveilling.

It says you can't massively collect data on US citizens because the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and the government is bound by that.

And what they've done is just buy the data from data brokers like cash.

Patel has said, yeah, the FBI, we're just going to go to the data brokers and buy it.

We don't need a warrant if we do that.

So they're circumventing these legal protections that we have.

And I think this is a concern.

We can have a separate conversation about the inevitability of surveillance cameras in cities and police needing them, because I don't think they're going away.

Right.

I think there's legitimate reasons that, like, hey, this is a dangerous intersection.

We have hit and runs here.

The police are going to want a camera to see what's going on.

Does that mean it's a camera owned by a private company that's collecting data on people who have done nothing.

Right?

I drive fast, I haven't done anything.

My data is in there, too.

What's it going to be used for?

Who's going to use it outside of this jurisdiction, and do I have any legal protections over that?

I don't, and I feel like as we get these big privately owned surveillance systems that government and law enforcement are interacting with, it just creates all these circumstances where we go around.

And so I agree with you.

And if I could just have to agree, one of the things we actually agree completely on this, on the idea of private.

Well, let's get to that point one second here, because I did want to ask a follow up on this idea of surveillance and democracy, because you also have now all over the country, city councils, you've got states, legislatures making decisions about, do we use license plate readers?

Do we not?

Do we put certain safeguards in place?

Do we not?

And they're coming to different conclusions sometimes.

Is that not just democracy in action?

And you are going to have some places with more surveillance or some with less, depending on what legislatures or city councils decide.

So I think to some extent that's true.

There may be some communities where the majority of people in those communities want the surveillance flock.

Homeowners associations have flock, and that if you have a gated community and all of you want that in there, like you can have that, right.

But I think what we're seeing with these city council votes is that there is mass bipartisan support for ending flock contracts, and the city councils are not doing that.

And so you may say, well, the city council is voting to renew those contracts.

That's democracy in action.

But are they actually responding to the constituents?

I mentioned to you before we started, I wrote a piece in Esquire this month where I spent weekend with the Proud Boys in North Carolina, and I was like, hey, politically, like, we are not on the same page, but I'd like to come and talk.

And, you know, they sadly introd The Proud Boys are profoundly against flock, at least this particular chapter that I talked to.

And so if I, if I'm like, all right, guys, well, we do agree on this one thing.

It tells you something about the base of of people in the wide range of people who don't want this technology.

Are the city councils actually representing.

So your point of view, as we need city councils to listen to the Proud Boys.

See, I disagree with that.

But hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on, hang on.

Are we really kidding?

Kidding I'm kidding.

I think you risk treading on engaging in bad faith arguments here, that people are expecting that from you.

And I don't want it.

I was joking.

Well, let me ask.

Let me know.

There's no room for a joke today.

Let me ask.

Let me ask this here to you, Josh, maybe we can talk about some more particulars here with with how this technology is used and potential safeguards.

I mean, people in Cleveland have expressed worries about this database being misused.

One such example are and there are, you know, there have been cases of this around the country of police officers using this to stalk exes, girlfriends, partners, what have you.

It appears that many of those cases, we learn about them because the officers have been caught and charged with a crime, and so they, to a certain degree, have been held accountable for what they did.

But it's after the fact.

It's after the damage is done.

What ought to be done to make sure that they can't even do that in the first place?

It can there ever be a protection to stop someone from doing something like that when they have this power at their disposal?

So your ask is, is there anything we can do from phlox point of view to stop bad people from doing bad things?

Yes.

I mean, particularly I would tell you, I would I would love to solve that problem.

Yeah.

Here's what I can tell you that if you talk to those folks at that table, they hate it more than anybody, that there are cops that are abusing the systems.

They have access to significantly more data than they do at flock.

Flock is the picture of the outside of a car.

They have access to very intensive databases about all of our lives, not just the pictures of cars.

If those cops were abusing those other systems, we wouldn't know about it.

Flock creates an audit trail.

Every click in flock is recorded and available for public audit.

That's how those folks were ultimately held accountable.

Because the system is working to find who is abusive, let's root them out and ensure they never have a job again and they go to jail.

That works.

Now, what I'll tell you is that is not enough.

I agree with you.

So what do we do?

We built a tool called Audit Assistance that is proactively looking for any sort of nefarious use or suspicious use.

How does it do that?

An officer is off duty.

They start using flock.

Let's make sure command staff knows that.

Is that within policy?

Is that legal?

Is it supposed to be done that way?

I don't know the answer to that question, but I bet command staff does.

So what we do is we have a tool that will proactively show our officers using this thing appropriately and within the confines of the law.

And if they're not, that is a responsibility for commands.

You have to go retrain or change how they're using these tools.

Well, gentlemen thank you.

Are there particular, say, safeguards or limits that could be applied to something like a license plate reader that would make you say, okay, we've we've sort of tied this down enough and addressed the privacy concerns enough that this is something that we can live with.

I wonder what where do you see as a line or the limit that ought to be applied?

I think the kinds of protections, whether it's this one that you're talking about with abuse or limiting, say, okay, we're going to use flock, but we will limit which agencies can use it.

We can we'll limit all these things.

I think that gives an illusion of actually solving the problem.

I think the problem is that innocent people who have done nothing are being surveilled by this massive system, having lots of data collected about them, and they don't know how that can be used.

They don't know what it's going to be used for.

We've seen flock used, for example, to track cars that were at No Kings protests.

These are legal protests.

Sure.

Like we've seen abuses like this.

We see all these different ways that this data can be used by potentially agencies or groups that, like a jurisdiction, might not want.

Right.

We've talked to jurisdictions here in Ohio where they don't want it being used for immigration, but that doesn't mean that some police officer in another place isn't just going to put investigation in the reason field and potentially get that data.

So I think these safeguards give us the illusion that we're doing something to try to make this better, but it doesn't actually solve the core problem, which is your surveilling people.

When they're out in public, you're collecting that, you're handing it to the police, and we don't have control over what's done with that.

I disagree that you don't have control, because actually, all the things that you name Jen, we actually go line by line and we regulate each of those things.

Well, let's ask maybe, maybe let's ask about, oh, you're saying who has access to the data.

At the end of the day, it's still I mean local police.

If no one else would have access.

The insinuation is that we don't know who has access.

That's what you said multiple times.

It could be used by local police, but the insinuation is could be used by anybody else.

And we don't know how.

I don't know exactly.

So what I'm saying is there's an opportunity for us to work with the people who use these tools to be accountable to that.

We built a thing called a transparency portal that shows exactly who has access to all the data.

Any city can use it today.

Thousands do.

Not everybody does.

I mean, it's me as a driver driving past a camera here, right?

If I drove here, I don't I don't, though the city of Cleveland has access to the tools to be able to show the world exactly who has asked.

I just drove from Washington to New Orleans.

If I want to know.

I drove past a lot of flat cameras.

Sure, I see him out the window every time I drive past.

If I want to know what are all the ways that that data could be used, how many jurisdictions contracts like how much do I have to look up on a 17 hour road trip to know how my data was used?

It's every one of those places I drove through.

I, as an individual, can't possibly know that I hear you.

What I would say is I actually disagree.

We don't have to agree on this, but I think it is possible to know that, because I think that the way that we set up a flock is all of the people who use our services own that data locally.

They decide who they share with.

We don't decide that they own a network of their own devices.

So if you know what cities you went through, you know what cities have collected that data and own it.

And you also know that it has been permanently deleted on a regular basis.

One thing that's interesting to me is let me see if the best way to get into this going to this issue of sharing of data, as I understand it, Cleveland Cleveland's police chief, said just last week that the city turned off the national search access.

And for those who don't know, this is essentially if you're on the national network, anybody else who has access to the national network could look up and see, you know, Cleveland's data would be searched as part of that.

And in fact, if you looked at the logs of searches of Cleveland data, two of the biggest users were, I think, the Dallas in Houston police departments, they just they use flock a lot.

And so it happens that they were also searching Cleveland's data a lot.

So Cleveland said we don't want to do that anymore.

For now, we'll see what they decide.

But don't you end up having this sort of patchwork where maybe some communities say, well, we don't want anyone else to search our data.

You're still going to have some people who say, but we want we want to be part of the national network.

And there still will be, in certain places, a wide range of people who could access this.

And then others say federal law enforcement, who might have someone in a sheriff's office who could look it up on their behalf.

I mean, that national network is still preserved in some form, even if it becomes more of a patchwork.

Is that what we're looking at right now?

You're scribing that correctly.

And what I would say is there's controls in the system for you to decide how you want your city's data to be used.

It can be used locally.

We change our system because of feedback, like what you provide in Doctor About.

Like the search result could be some bull____ reason like investigative.

We are on live radio, by the way.

We allow me to say a small delay, but pardon me.

Go ahead.

There could be a fake reason put into the system like I envy.

We've changed that now.

It's based on what's called the neighbors code.

This is a curated list of only specific offense types that can come in.

So you can't get around that unless you lie.

Then you violated policy and you've broken the law.

You will be held accountable.

But let me finish this thought.

You can also share your cameras that granular.

So if the city of Cleveland says, I only want people to use this for homicides and nothing else, or kidnapings and nothing else, you can granular do that.

So ultimately is incumbent on the local jurisdiction to make the cities are the ones who are owning this.

They have their problem.

They have a crime problem.

They're trying to find a solution.

They own the data to the solution.

They are the ones who decide how it should be used.

Well, what do you make of those?

I mean, are any of those safeguards give you any, I don't know, any pause or any.

I mean, tell me what you think of those.

I mean, I think I come back to the same answer I gave before, right?

That that I think those sorts of safeguards give an illusion of solving the problem, because the problem is bigger than any of those one technical things.

Right?

The problem is that you are constantly surveilling people who are just going about their daily lives.

They have no control over it.

If I go outside my local jurisdiction, I, I, I hear you, man.

But like if I drive for 17 hours, like, there's no way I can know how this data is being used.

I don't have any control over it.

Right.

And I think preserving those rights where I should be allowed to move freely and not be surveilled and not have police in all these different places tracking my movements like I should have the freedom to do that.

I think that's fundamental to our democracy.

Would you want to see, say, a requirement put in place whether that would be maybe a Supreme Court decision or otherwise?

It says police, if you want to search a license plate reader database or something similar, you need a warrant.

You can't just log in.

Would that be a protection that you'd want to see 100%?

I mean, if we're going to have this yeah, I want there to be a warrant.

I also think there's a you know, I think there's a complement of this where if you are the city of Cleveland and you say, I talked to somebody about this a couple of weeks ago, we have this intersection.

There's all these hit and runs.

We want to have a camera there.

I'm not making an argument here that the City of Cleveland Police Department should not put a camera at that intersection so they can watch when this happens and do their investigation.

Right.

I'm this we can have a separate discussion about should there be any surveillance anywhere at all.

But I think there's something fundamentally different from my local police put a camera that they can look at that's not connected into a network, that's national, that's not connected into a private company.

And they use that for their investigations.

I think that's fundamentally different than what we're talking about.

So I think we'll kind of ask you this.

Do you think that flock would be able to exist in its current form if warrants were required for every search?

I think 100%.

I would support that if it was a legal precedent to do so.

And secondly, what I would say is if the amount of data crossed that line, courts have asked this.

You brought it up.

Dozens, of course, have asked this question today.

The volume of data is not at that place where it is described as you are describing it.

It's not there.

So in the absence of that today, people who commit crime don't respect a jurisdiction.

If I committed a crime in Cleveland, I'm not going to just stay in Cleveland.

I'm driving outside that jurisdiction.

So those two outside agencies must be able to collaborate on these sort of issues.

And the other thing about getting a warrant, I would support that 100%.

You can't get a warrant on a description of a car.

Let me have a warrant for a gray car.

Think about the Brown University killing that happened in November last year.

A person comes in and kills a bunch of people and drives out.

How do you get a word for that?

You can't.

You need some piece of information to start your investigation.

Somebody gave a tip on Reddit, I think it was, and said it was a silver niece on our granny's on or something.

They could plug it in a flock and get a lead.

Then the additional investigative steps that needed to take.

Yes, sure.

Let's go get a warrant for that.

Let me for the initial lead.

We need a place to start.

When you have horrible things that happen in this society.

Well, because we are going to be turning over to questions relatively soon and next several minutes here.

And so I want to maybe get to this before I'm sure there'll be other issues that'll come up.

But, you know, at its core, and you see this in some of the federal rulings, too, there's this idea of at some point there is too much surveillance.

You know, it is it is sometimes a language use, it is too pervasive, or it is tracking the whole of your movements everywhere you go.

And at that point, we have crossed the line.

We are in Fourth Amendment territory.

You need a warrant and needs to be subjected to a reasonableness standard.

You know, Jennifer, you where is that line?

Where do you think we are at the point of too much surveillance.

I mean, I think we're way past the point of too much surveillance.

Like, generally, what's the number of cameras?

I can't tell you.

I'll tell you that part of the time.

I live in the Florida Keys, which is one road for 120 miles, and there's one flock camera they're at at a park, and I give it a dirty look every time I walk, every time I drive past it, I don't want to be tracked, like driving on my one road.

But I think, you know, your interest is very clear in distinguishing.

Hey, you're only tracked at these individual points where that camera sees you, which is different than GPS, because the courts have ruled that GPS data requires a warrant in flock doesn't, or we're waiting to see their work.

In those cases, the flat cases are working their way through the courts to we've had currently.

That is correct.

Right.

Yeah.

So, you know, if I'm tracked every block, how different is that from my GPS.

Right.

Like like you're sort of asking these technical question of like when does it get to be the GPS.

My opinion is it doesn't have to be as granular as GPS.

It doesn't have to be a sensor on every corner that if I can't drive around my town and conduct my business and be free of government surveillance of my interactions and my movements when I'm not doing anything wrong, that that's a problem.

And I think in a lot of places, flock already enabled me that same question.

I'm going to ask you a version of that question, because I'd like to be able to answer that, which is well, yeah.

Which is this.

So there are actually one.

So the county prosecutor here in Cuyahoga County provided as part of the sort of lobbying for this, getting this block contract passed, provided a whole list of cases where they say they used flock technology, whether that's license plate readers or other things.

One case that was of interest to me was it was a major drug bust.

It was a fentanyl trafficking indictment, 37 defendants.

And here is what the prosecutor's office said about the case.

Flock cameras were used to track vehicles associated with this group, identify travel patterns, and assist investigators in linking participants to the organization.

Now, people may not have sympathy for fentanyl traffickers, but the fundamental point here is it sounds like they are using flock not just to capture a point in time, but to establish travel patterns during an investigation.

Isn't that going a little bit further and starting to look at the whole of someone's movements?

We're looking at their patterns over time.

I think you have to be very specific with that case.

I don't know the details.

Yeah, I wish we had more there.

But that's what I would say is that, like if we get specific with the details, I would ask that exact same question and say, yeah, is there too much information there?

Regulate it.

Let's put a warrant requirement in for that specific example.

If it did cross that line, what's what's been clear is doctor has not decided to take a stab at how many sensors are too many.

Courts have not decided how many sensors are too many.

Nobody has wanted to take that up.

I would say let's go study that.

I would 100% support that.

I would also say, if you today think that we have too many centers in the world, then you're not living in reality is my point of view.

There are literally millions of unsolved murders in this country.

Literally, kids get kidnaped in this country every single day.

That is not okay.

The predominant person who takes on the brunt of crime in this community are black and brown communities, eight times more likely to be the victim of crime?

That is not okay.

The old way of doing things is not working.

We need to think about how we do these things differently.

I'm not saying technology is the only solution.

I don't think it is.

I think we have to invest in the community.

I think we have to do a lot more for it, but I think it's got to be part of it.

And as you said, and I've said, this is inevitable.

This technology will exist.

And I don't don't attribute that to me, I don't agree.

I said, there will be a second.

Let me finish this thought, please.

That like there will be cameras in public and if it's not flock, it'll be somebody else.

So the question that we have to ask ourselves is, how do you then align the values that matter?

What's the right amount of sensors?

I'm open to you telling me, well, what what your thoughts are on that.

How many what is the line where there is all pervasive?

Too much surveillance, tracking the whole.

I'm a believer in mosaic theory that it's not one piece of information that matters.

But if you can take the whole of all these different sensors and put together the whole of your movements, that is, cross the line.

Clearly I think we have a protection from unreasonable search and seizure.

That's what the Constitution protects us or affords us.

It does not give us a right to privacy.

And I would say that the line that you cross is when you can actually see the whole of people's movements.

Flock is so far from that today, so far from that.

We are not collecting the whole of people's movements.

What we do is give you point in time imagery to help stop crime.

Well, before we go to question, sir, I do want to ask you about this broader idea.

You know, our Google searches can be subpoenaed and they are in criminal cases.

You know, somebody is indicted on murder charges and they googled how to hide a body that will come out in court.

You know, you can if you've ever done one of those ancestry tests, your DNA is available to police.

They can get that information.

Obviously, we've talked about cameras.

I mean, is it true that it is just inevitable that we are all being surveilled in many different ways and the Rubicon has been crossed and there is no going back.

So two, two responses.

That one is that, you know, these other things that you brought up Google searches, DNA, they need a warrant to get that right.

All like our phones.

Yeah.

They're tracking us all over the place.

I also think a lot of that should be illegal, by the way.

We can have a separate forum about that.

But the fact that all this data about us is being recorded, that doesn't mean the police have a direct line to that.

And that is fundamentally different from flock.

But, you know, while I agree that there will be cameras in the world, I don't think the surveillance structure is inevitable.

And the best and hopeful analogy that anyone has ever given me is that we went for a very long time with leaded gasoline in this company, in this country, and eventually we figured out that was harmful and there was no good way to use it.

And we got rid of it.

And I like to think in terms of data in surveillance.

We are in the gas phase now, and in 20 years we're going to look back and be like, what the hell were we thinking?

We can do better and we're not going to do that anymore.

That's where I hope we end up.

All right.

Well, thank you very much.

We're going to turn now to the audience Q&A.

Thank you everybody.

And for those who are just tuning in to our live stream or radio audience, I'm Nick Castele, government reporter at Signal Cleveland.

I'm the moderator for today's conversation.

We're here with Doctor Jen Golbeck, a computer scientist, AI ethics and privacy expert at the University of Maryland, as well as Joshua Thomas, the chief communications officer of Flock Safety.

We're discussing the evolution, ethics and future of AI powered surveillance across the nation.

We welcome questions from everyone city Club members, guests, and of course, those joining via our live stream at City Club or live radio broadcast at 89 seven sir.

Stream Public media.

If you would like to text a question for our speakers, please text it to (330)541-5794 again, (330)541-5794, and city club staff will try to work it into the program.

A reminder if you will keep your questions short to the point.

Ask a question that our audience members or excuse me, that our panelists can respond to as well.

And maybe we have the first question, please.

Yes.

Thank you.

Good afternoon.

I would like to understand the financial structure behind flock and municipal governments and Amazon.

Who's paying whom.

How does flying money a city contracts with flock to provide services of cameras and hardware.

And then they own the data.

So we pay Amazon to store the data in the cloud.

Does that answer your question?

Thank you.

Great.

Thank you very much.

Much appreciate it.

Do we have other questions at this point?

I see people approaching the microphone right now.

Thank you.

So thanks for this discussion.

Really important topic and appreciate the back and forth.

My name is Brian Ray.

I'm the Cohen from dean at Clinton State University College of Law.

And I direct the center for Cyber Security and Privacy, also part of the advisory group for the Cleveland Policing Commission.

What's a little surprising to me about this conversation is Cleveland actually passed a set of guidelines that adopted some community standards that that went above what the Fourth Amendment requires, and some of those actually overlapped with some of the things that the Council has, has prescribed and very specifically defined.

The use cases require specific training, require that the data be purged unless it has it's tied to very, very specific use.

Now, I agree with all of your points, Doctor Golbeck, that, you know, this is a Band-Aid on a larger wound that we need to think about holistically.

But in spite of all the attention that's made of this, that that that policy has not surfaced, as far as I can tell.

And we aren't talking about we aren't trying to move forward on building on the basis that we've already built.

And a lot of things you mentioned about Fox capabilities are has Cleveland tapped into those?

Do you know, are we using those?

Because we are.

We're supposed to be auditing all uses and and actually limiting it to trained officers in the department for very specific things.

Well, it sounds like there's a couple of questions in there.

One would be about the limits that the city of Cleveland put in place.

I know one of them is they want, you know, regular publication of some transparency about how this is being used.

Is that the kind of thing that you're hoping more maybe cities or state legislatures would adopt?

No.

You know, I think I'm risking hitting the point a little too often, but I, I hear I hear this point, right, that there are these safeguards that can be put in place.

But I think the problem is bigger, right?

I think that like citizens who are going about their days moving through their communities where they have no choice to opt out, right?

It's not like social media.

It's not even like using a cell phone.

I have no choice but to opt out of being surveilled by these cameras when I'm not doing anything wrong, and I don't know how that data is going to be used.

I don't really know.

Right.

Like you're saying, okay, we know the searches, we can audit it, but I don't know if someone out of state is going to search this.

I don't know if my license plate is going to accidentally come up stolen, like literally two days ago.

I think we got a story out from The Drive, a sort of automotive online magazine where you're nodding, you know, where he was test driving a Jaguar and and he got pulled over at gunpoint with four police cars because flock misread the license plate.

And there were also a bunch of other cars.

That's not what happened.

So you guys can go read his piece at the drive, please.

But I don't know if there's going to be something accidental that happens with that.

Right?

Is there an error in the data that gets put in a license plate that's reported stolen, a car that's still I should be able to go about my life in my community without being surveilled.

And so these sorts of like, we can do these settings within the flock system, don't address what I think are the core problems, which is that it is undemocratic to be surveilling average citizens who have done nothing wrong as they go about their lives.

Just so if some person does something bad, we have also caught them up in that big net.

I don't think we should be surveilled that well, let's let's go to our next.

Thank you folks.

Let's go to our next question here.

In the interest of keeping this conversation moving.

Yes, please.

On July 30th, 2025, nine news, which is Denver, Colorado, CBS local station, asked flock CEO Garrett Langley if Flock had any federal contracts.

We don't, Langley responded on August 19th, which was approximately 20 days later.

Flock, quote, now admits federal immigration agents have direct access to local police data through a pilot program, contradicting months of public denials about such arrangements.

Tell us, Mr.

Thomas, does flock have a contract with any federal agency?

And why should we believe you since you've lied about it before?

Well, first of all, I. I appreciate you have a chance to answer.

You said Garrett did that, I didn't I didn't lie about this.

That is that is true.

But also, we all have a boss in some ways of Donald Trump.

Just because he lies doesn't mean that.

Look, I'm just saying that, like we're paying you.

Well, well, hang on, hang on a second.

I think it's important distinction.

You just said I lied.

I had nothing to do this.

Here's the here's the thing.

We do have federal contracts.

We work with federal government.

Absolutely.

They have resources to do things that local police departments do not have to stop things like human trafficking and fentanyl drug trafficking.

That's a fact.

Now, what we don't do is we don't work with any immigration services.

We don't have contracts with Ice.

We don't they don't have direct access to our platform.

They don't our competitors.

They do.

All of them do.

That's the difference here.

Flock took a stand and said, we are not doing that.

We are supporting local governments with their local crime problems.

We're not working on these other issues.

So why should you believe us?

Because we publicize this stuff.

The reason that, you know this information is because we have an audit log that shows this information that is that is actually true.

There was an audit log that showed this in Colorado.

That's that's how this.

Let me ask you this.

Don't lie there immutable because I did want to get to that immigration question here.

And we'll get to your question just a second here.

I understand that there were immigration agencies I think were part of a pilot program.

At some point you're saying no longer a part of it, but our immigration related searches still occurring in places where local law enforcement permitted to happen.

Maybe they are working with collaboration in a place like Texas or Florida, where they work with federal immigration authorities.

Absolutely.

They have decided to do that.

We don't directly contract with those agencies.

If they want to search their local system, to try to find if there is an immigration, if the people there want that democratically, they should be allowed to do that.

You say this is not part of a democracy, I disagree.

In Florida, they voted that way.

I don't live in Florida.

I didn't vote that way, I voted differently, I operate differently, but if in a place they want to operate that way, that is their decision to do so.

And what I would say is they can use tools that align with their values.

And in Cleveland it can operate differently.

You can use these tools in a way that aligns with your values, and that can be different.

And the other part that I would say on all this is, look, you're right, that was a mistake in Colorado.

It was a mistake.

I agree with you.

And you know, what we've done since then is I've showed up the place like this and taking questions from people who say, you're a liar.

And I go, or maybe he made a mistake, and maybe we've changed the system since then, and we don't have pilot projects, and we've rebuilt the system from the ground up.

You don't have to believe me.

I'm here right now.

Answering your question, can I just ask you one quick follow up here?

Because I'm interested in this idea, especially the data security thing, where a city could say, well, we don't want ice, we don't want other law enforcement agencies to see our data.

Isn't it still possible that they could come to that city or come to flock with a warrant or a subpoena and say, you need to give us that data, even though you don't currently permit access.

They could come to us and say that.

And what we would say is, no, we don't own this data.

You have to go to the city.

This is not our responsibility or our right to do it.

It's theirs.

Has that happened before?

They have come to us and we have said, no, it is not our data.

We cannot give this to you.

Go to the cities and they've gone to the cities.

That's exactly right.

Do you know if the cities have turned it over?

I don't know.

Okay.

Do you want to respond to that quickly?

And we'll get to your question.

Yeah.

Just just one really quick point, for example, on Florida where I said I live part of the time the state passed a law in Florida that every jurisdiction, every local jurisdiction, every law enforcement agency has to have an agreement with Ice.

They have to do it.

So in Key West, which is a pretty deep blue dot, they didn't want to do that.

And the state said you have to like there's no choice.

Every law enforcement agency, every local one in Florida has to cooperate with immigration.

They have to have that agreement in place.

And so it like these situations highlight part of the difficulty with saying there's local control.

Local authorities get to decide like they don't always.

In this case, if there were a flock camera in Key West, that information would be accessible to ice, even though the people there don't want.

And state and local preemption a big issue in Ohio to maybe a future panel topic.

Thank you for your patience.

Could we have your question, please?

Oh, is it my turn?

Yes, please.

Thank you.

First, to the representative of flock.

This isn't an easy job.

You're doing okay, but thank you.

Just a point of clarification before I ask my question, there are not millions of unsolved murders in America.

There's less than half a million.

Sometimes the need to solve a problem is based on a tiny exaggeration that puts people in a level of fear that they're willing to accept mass surveillance to solve a problem that doesn't exist.

And in your question, please.

And my question.

Yes.

Thank you.

If we do get to a point where democracy speaks for the masses and we either require there to be warrants before you can record information and hand it over, or democracy speaks and puts guides on surveillance in the next job you have after flock goes out of business, will you decide to represent our civil liberties with your rhetorical capability instead of chipping away at them?

I don't know if you're looking for any jobs, but it sounds like you have an offer.

I feel very flattered by you.

I'm a I'm a charming man.

Yeah, well, here's what I would say.

First of all, you're right.

There's a half a million unsolved murders every year.

What total?

Well, we can we can Google that.

Yes, but let's go.

Look, there's a lot of there's a lot of unsolved violent crime every calendar year.

A lot of those are murders.

Those don't get solved the next year.

The point I'm trying to make is there's a lot of violent crime.

There are a half million violent crimes that go unsolved every year.

Half a million, according to FBI, UCR code.

So let's look at that.

A half million violent crimes go unsolved every year.

That's a problem if you are the victim of violent crime today, 5050 chance that get solved, that's a problem.

What do we do about that?

I want to be a part of that solution.

That is true.

And you're right.

I forget the person who where he went who asked the question.

But what I would say is this.

Oh, sorry.

Here you are.

What I would say is, I hope that we do enough good in this world, that I'm out of a job.

I would love that.

I would love to move on to some other problem.

I would love to say that crime is solved.

It's not.

It's an issue today.

So we got to work on it.

And I don't think it's an okay point of view to say this is all bad, so we can't regulate it.

I go the opposite way and say we can regulate it.

I believe in democracy from that point of view that says every community is going to be different.

Let's regulate these tools, because if we're not here, another company, we'll be here.

And Jen, I think you want to get in on this and then we'll go to your question.

Thank you.

Yeah.

You know, I think part of the issue with this argument, if, if we take that in good faith, is that the data is not there to support that flock, actually does this flock has numbers about crimes that flock has solved, but these are crimes where flock data has been included.

And that doesn't mean that the police wouldn't have solved those crimes.

There's no independent data that shows we have a reduction in crime, that we have an increase in solve rates.

If flock cameras are present.

I would love to do that research, I would.

Great, Cleveland, you can give me all your data and we'll see.

Like is there actually a reduction in crime by having cameras there.

What we've well and I'm sorry in Cleveland while in Cleveland to that point.

I mean they did present some information to city Council saying that they believe they saw an uptick in some solves of certain crimes after they adopted flock.

But they also acknowledged that there could be other variables there.

You're not necessarily controlling for just flock, no flock.

There are other factors that could be at play.

So there is still some ambiguity about what impact there has been in Cleveland.

There's no data showing.

There's no independent studies that show if you introduce flock cameras.

Yeah, right.

Broadly speaking.

Right.

All like we could do that research but it's not there yet and we support it.

I could reach out to the University of Chicago Crime Lab to try to do this research.

And they said, no, we've reached out to multiple professors and they said, let's, let's get to this question here, and then we'll maybe continue that.

Yes, please.

if you truly believe that we should have more resources spent for community not on punitive and carceral and surveillance measures compared to what we have now, what percentage of public funds of taxpayer dollars do you think should actually be spent resourcing communities and preventing crime?

By making sure that our communities are cared for and taken care of, rather than just waiting for people in desperate situations to commit crimes and then punishing them.

Thank you very much.

I'll have you respond to that first, and then we'll go to to Josh.

And then I do we want to get to your question too.

So we'll keep moving here.

I'll be as quick as I can.

So I think there's three points that you bring up.

The first is a sort of colonial reference.

And I'll just say that we have like in the philosophical space around ethics on this.

We talk about something called data colonialism.

I have Ted talk coming out Monday all about that if you want to know more about it.

But but it actually echoes it uses the models of understanding colonial behavior to then describe systems like this kind of mass surveillance, where we're doing it with data instead.

So I just want to sort of I'm sure you know this.

Right.

But sort of refer others to this idea of data colonialism is not one that either of us came up with, but it is a very robust structure for understanding this in a good place to go for learning more.

The inevitability question of this, I think, is an interesting one, and I kind of cut off a discussion that we were having in the green room, because you do hear this a lot.

It's inevitable that this is going to happen.

You hear that with a lot of technology, but we have renewable energy.

And why is that not inevitable?

Why is it we've gone backwards on that in the last few years when it's a technology that's out there, right.

Like I think the inevitability argument is not a good one.

And it sort of leads into your final point, which is like, how are we spending this money?

Because I agree, like, police have a difficult job and we want crime to go down like we agree on.

This is the way to do that.

By introducing a massive nationwide surveillance infrastructure.

There's a lot of evidence out there on community programs where money can be spent that that have demonstrated positive effects, unlike with flock, where we don't have independent data that demonstrates that it reduces crime.

So I think these are all important.

In the interest of time, I want to go to our David Hertz, a grandson of our namesake of this of this panel.

Please go right ahead.

Thank you very much.

And what a great conversation.

My grandfather would have loved this.

So thank you to all three of you.

Dan, what a what a great panel to put together.

My question really is around the responsibility that companies like flock have for helping society come up with the guardrails for the use of their technology.

So you've said many, many times up there that you would welcome this, or municipalities could do this with the with the technology.

What responsibility does Flock have to help us utilize the technology in a responsible, democratic way?

And particularly if I could just bring in another point from that, in an era when there is very low trust in both private companies and the government, it's incredibly difficult.

You're right.

Thank you for how hard it's going to be to build trust when people don't trust Big Tech or the government.

What I would say is we have to expose what the dials are, what can you what dials can you turn?

And that's what I think there is.

Who has access to the data?

What type of data gets collected?

How long does the data exist?

I think all of those questions should be answered and should be regulated in the city level.

I think on top of that, we have a responsibility to ensure that we do everything we can to make sure there's nobody abusing the platform.

There are cases of that.

How do we build more tools to stop that?

That's what I want to do more of.

But at the same time, I think it is.

It is a fictional world for us to live in.

To acknowledge crime.

It exists.

Problems exist.

We have to try to solve those problems.

Long term investments in community.

I agree with let's do that.

But also there's a lot of primary research that shows the certainty of being caught is the best a turn of crime, not punitive measures, not locking in the interest of time because we are running low.

I just want to turn it to Jen very quickly.

If you could respond to that question, if I can, just a little twist to it.

I know the question here was, what can companies like Foxx do to ensure trust?

I know you've said that you want to see a different, say, paradigm around surveillance.

Who should decide that and how?

I mean, I think communities communities should decide.

And we absolutely like we want to solve crimes, right?

We want to listen to law enforcement, but we also want to listen to people who are like doing the research into how do we effectively reduce crime.

Look at what that kind of investment looks like in communities, because I don't think it lies in mass surveillance.

And I'll say, because I know we have to wrap up like I have been a victim of violent crime where people have not been prosecuted.

Would I trade away the constitutional protections of my community to have that crime solved?

I would not, and I think it's disingenuous to ask the community to look at these cases where it's great that we solved them, but to ignore the cost on the other side, which is the community giving up these protections that are written into the Constitution.

Well, thank you both very much.

Thank you.

Audience.

So many more things I would have loved to talk about.

But you know, an hour is short.

Thank you to Doctor Golbeck and Josh for joining us at the City Club today.

Forums like this are made possible thanks to generous support from individuals like you.

You can learn more about how to become a guardian of free speech at City Club.

Today's forum is the City Club's David Ralph Hertz Memorial Forum on Civil Liberties.

Mr.

Hertz was a lawyer, judge and community leader in Cleveland for more than 60 years.

He joined the City Club in 1923 and was also active in the American Civil Liberties Union, representing that organization in a number of civil liberties cases in Cleveland.

His grandson, as we know, David Hertz, is also a longtime member of the City Club, and we are pleased to have him with us here today.

Thank you once again to Doctor Jen Golbeck and Josh Thomas, and to our members and friends at the City Club.

I'm Nick Castele from signal, Cleveland and this forum is now adjourned.

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