Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code
Flock’s surveillance cameras have already sparked outrage. WIRED reconstructed its next-generation AI system, already in use by some police, to confirm it goes much further than tracking license plates.
Flock Safety, a vehicle surveillance company, has developed an artificial intelligence tool called OS Investigate that can identify drivers and track vehicles based on their patterns of movement. The tool draws on a network of cameras logging driver movements in over 6,000 communities. It can identify potential witnesses by their frequent passage through neighborhoods or surface a driver's "associates" from the cameras they pass together.
The software can be used to search for people in a specific area based on a physical description, and it has access to police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, turning vehicle plates into names, home addresses, and relatives. The AI tool ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can use, review, or edit, and also allows them to input their own prompts.
The prompts can be used to search for individuals based on various criteria, such as the neighborhood, time period, and behavior, or simply provide a physical description. The tool's capabilities are still in development, as it is being tested with a small group of law enforcement partners, and its eventual release may differ from its current state.
Privacy and legal experts have raised concerns about Flock's tools, as they give police broad, often warrantless access to a vast record of people's movement. However, the prompts WIRED examined indicate that the tool is designed to create suspicion on drivers based on their driving patterns, regardless of whether they are wanted for a crime.
Written by urgent.news from Wired's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — may contain errors; check the original before relying on it.
