Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash

Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.

But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating Flock Safety, the maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.

Benn recently testified in front of Congress, at a hearing the Senate Judiciary Committee’s Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism held, dedicated to Flock and other ALPR systems. This hearing felt like the culmination of months and months of growing criticism and bipartisan backlash against Flock — all of which is taking a shape similar to the pushback against AI data centers.

This has led to major fallout for Flock. Hundreds of cities, counties, and other local governments have begun canceling contracts, and Flock is now under investigation by Republican Sen. Josh Hawley. Last week, Reuters reported that Flock plans to cut about 18 percent of its workforce.

So of course I wanted to dig into all of that with Benn, not just because he played a role in that, but because he’s also become in some ways the face of a new front in the broader debate about surveillance and privacy.

A point you’ll hear Benn make is that he doesn’t actually hate Flock as a company — he thinks its posture toward critics has been a colossal PR failure that made it low-hanging fruit, while competitors like Axon and Motorola quietly build the same kind of networks. Instead, Benn now talks to Flock directly, including to its CEO Garrett Langley, and reports security vulnerabilities to the company when he finds them. (As a side note: we have also invited Flock’s CEO on the show; Garrett if you’re listening, we would love to have you.)

Benn says his outreach to the company is an olive branch he’s extended to Flock as part of his goal of working toward real, tangible solutions to surveillance overreach, rather than part of a crusade to tear one single company down.

That’s a real theme throughout our conversation: that Flock and other high profile names in surveillance are just part of the problem — our real focus should be on the interlocking relationship between private industry, government, and law enforcement that prioritizes secrecy over transparency.

We never voted for an insecure network of cameras on every street corner, and we’re certainly not being asked if we’re comfortable with access to this network being given to police officers with a penchant for abusing it. So Benn sees his work on YouTube and with other researchers, civil rights groups, and journalists as an accountability function that forces this conversation to the forefront. And so far, it’s working.

Okay: Benn Jordan on Flock, privacy, and the new surveillance backlash. Here we go.

This interview has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Benn Jordan, you’re a musician, YouTuber, and researcher. Lately you’ve been an investigative journalist. You are a witness in Senate hearings. Welcome to Decoder.

Thanks for having me.

I’m a huge fan of yours. It’s just a delight to have you here. A lot of people in the Verge audience know you as a musician, but lately you have been relentlessly focused on Flock cameras, which are automatic license-plate readers (ALPRs). You recently testified in front of a Senate hearing on those cameras and the surveillance they enable.

Give us a sense of your background. For people who don’t know you or haven’t been following you for years, where did Benn Jordan come from and how did you end up being the person who makes videos about Flock?

I’ve been a musician my entire life, pretty much. I’ve also always been kind of a hacker, or somebody who is that type of person who always takes stuff apart. If I get a product that wants me to pay for a service that’s already in the product, then that’s a puzzle I want to solve and I get excited about it. But a lot of times that blends into investigative journalism as well.

With the Flock stuff, it’s just that I live in Atlanta, which has more Flock cameras than anywhere else per square mile. About two years ago I started noticing them. I thought they were traffic cameras or something like that. Then I started looking into what they were actually doing and then started looking into things like security vulnerabilities. More than anything, everything that’s happening right now in the public, in the news, has to do with people just figuring out that these have existed the entire time.

A lot of my focus now is on the lack of transparency from the government, because the companies are always going to make money and try to make as much money as they can, especially if it’s from taxpayer money. But in this case, I feel like our government missed it. And that’s where we’re at.

There’s a question that’s been rattling around my head the entire time we’ve been having what I would call the modern privacy and surveillance debate.

When I say “modern,” what I mean is it feels like we woke up sometime in the last year and everything is recording us all the time and everything is watching us and the glasses have cameras in them and Mark Zuckerberg is saying phones don’t have a light, and that is meant to end a conversation.

That’s it. That’s the argument. Phones don’t have a light, no further questions. The Apple Watch is going to start doing automatic transcriptions, and everyone said, “Wait, hold on. No thank you. We actually don’t want this to happen.” But my personal experience of this is that my political coming of age was the Iraq War and the Patriot Act.

This is the stuff that people were talking about twenty-five years ago — don’t do warrantless wiretaps, don’t make the databases all connect to each other so you can take the metadata and de-anonymize people at will.

What is it about this time that has made everybody so angry? Because we could have been angry twenty-five years ago.

I’m always trying to get people more informed on the information that’s being collected about them every time they go to a website, every time they sign up for something, every time they check into a restaurant online, every time they use their phone. In this case, one of the reasons that people are really upset about is that you can’t opt out. That’s the first thing.

I can’t say, “I don’t want these Flock cameras or Axon cameras or whatever they are tracking my every move and giving it to law enforcement.” I have no option to do that. I was never given an option on whether to vote for them or vote for somebody who was in favor of them. It just kind of happened and you know people weren’t told about them. That would be the first thing — that you can still install a separate OS on an Android phone or you could turn off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth or just leave your phone at home. Whereas now you can’t actually go to the grocery store without somebody tracking your vehicle.

The second thing is that — and this is kind of related to opting in and opting out — I can pay for a new AI smartwatch or I can pay for an Amazon Echo device or something like that, or I cannot. Whereas this way I’m paying for this already. This is just my property taxes going up and I’m paying for surveillance.

In some ways it is the same as the NSA, but I feel like it’s much more local now.

You don’t get to go to the town board meeting and yell at the NSA. Although maybe you should. Honestly, that might be good for everyone. There is that part of it, and you’ve certainly been at a bunch of local town board meetings. I’ve watched a lot of videos of you talking to them and helping other people articulate their concerns.

That, to me, is one of the more fascinating aspects of all this. Flock went from a company that was selling cameras to everyone, and the idea that adding Flock cameras would increase the safety of your town went from all but assumed to, “Hold on, we all have a lot of questions,” and now this company is struggling a little bit. They’re losing contracts, they are retrenching, their communication strategy has changed.

What do you make of that? Is that just the power of local democracy in action, or is there something else?

It definitely is democracy in action. That’s the good news. The best news out of anything that’s happened is that with both Flock and data centers, it’s two things that have made people actually look up who their mayor is and who their city council members are and show up to meetings and then get involved in those local politics.

Because those local politics affect your life way more than national politics. They just don’t make the headlines. We’re not as involved. Your day-to-day following what Donald Trump is doing is likely not going to make that big of a difference other than what you argue about over Thanksgiving. Whereas local politics, that’s straight up, in the next year, going to have a big effect on your life.

People are getting involved in that, and then in cases like Asheville, North Carolina, where it’s actually changing the political landscape. People are so dissatisfied with the surveillance policies of their local politicians that it looks like that they may have a new mayor as a result of it, who also comes with a bunch of other interesting and progressive ideas that would probably help the city a lot more than the current mayor has.

That’s a big deal right there. The other part that discourages me a little bit, or the part that I find a little disappointing, is that Flock has become this buzzword, but a lot of people don’t look beyond that. I just heard in the race for governor in Georgia that the Democratic candidate yesterday talked about getting rid of Flock cameras and being anti-Flock, when this is somebody who as mayor of Atlanta welcomed Flock. You see a lot of that happening now, too, where they just say “Flock bad” and then they go sign an Axon contract or they put Verkada or Motorola cameras everywhere.

In my research, Flock has been the low-hanging fruit, just because they were the loudest and most defensive, whereas every other company was just taking a step back and cashing the checks.

One of the pieces of the puzzle here that is just fascinating is that Flock is a startup, essentially. They’re a new company, they have a new go-to-market strategy. They talk a big game about what AI can and can’t do and with what they as a platform should and should not enable. Your Axons and your Motorolas are government contractors. They are not companies that are meant to have a personality.

There’s something about Flock where Garrett Langley, the CEO, had a personality. He would go on TV and deride any critics as left-wing terrorists and that did not work. There’s something about surveillance in that case where that strategy didn’t work. There’s something about data centers where that strategy didn’t work.

We just ran a big piece about the people of Utah pushing back on Kevin O’Leary, who called them all Chinese agents, and they were like, “What are you talking about?” That cut across party lines. Again, you’ve been out there. I know you’ve talked to a lot of people pushing back on surveillance.

Is it just that Flock had a personality, and that enabled bipartisan pushback? Or is it surveillance more generally?

In terms of the media getting attention, Flock had a lot of personality and they were very defensive. I’ve met a lot of the people from Flock who are so villainized and they don’t seem at all the way that they’ve seemed in the clips that I’ve covered in my content. It’s very different. You would assume that there’s a publicist behind a lot of this.

Especially in something that serves law enforcement, where you would maybe have a publicist that’s used to dealing with Republicans and right-wing things, they just tell you to keep repeating the same thing over and over again and take a firm stance and dig your heels in. Most people who aren’t Donald Trump, when they do that, get wrecked. Flock got wrecked. They kept saying things and they kept denying security vulnerabilities and they used clever ways of reframing or redefining words and people picked up on it and now they are the villain.

Whereas companies like Axon are not as sexy for a journalist. They just aren’t, and that’s probably intentional on their part. Any company that’s taking your tax dollars or trying to court your government to give your tax dollars to them probably wants to be out of the spotlight.

We’ve covered Axon before. They do not want to be a company with characters. They are as anonymous as they can be.

One of the things that I want to see with you on the show, most importantly of all, is to describe what a Flock camera is and what the technology behind the hardware does that makes it new.

Because from watching all the videos that you make, I think, “It’s just an Android phone. They’re just putting a bunch of Android phones around town,” but it’s actually the database and the AI that makes it more dangerous than usual. Describe what the actual Flock hardware is and then how that connects to the system that makes it as controversial as it is.

So ALPRs have existed, I believe, since the 1970s. They started getting used in the United States in the late 80s and 90s. One of the classic ways that they would be used in the 2000s is they would be mounted on a police car. If a police car wanted to run someone’s plate, that way they didn’t have to type it in while they’re driving, and they could run a plate over to dispatch. I personally don’t have any problem with that. I think that makes sense. That’s a decent use. However, you would have issues where you would get plate misreads and then people would get taken out of their car at gunpoint as a result.

Flock is a lot different. Flock basically started a private nationwide network where any police department or city that’s using Flock’s network can opt into it and share their data with it. Police departments across the country can then run a license plate with 30 days of retention on everywhere someone’s been, anywhere in the country, as long as they’re sharing the data. So you would have someone in Texas being able to search somebody’s movement through New York or Atlanta or something like that.

They were doing this — they are doing this — without a warrant. Whereas any type of ALPR data sharing previous to Flock had to go through the National Crime Information Center, which does require a magistrate judge to look at the overall context of a situation and then issue a warrant to allow tracking.

That’s the innovation here. They built the private network, the private database, and convinced a bunch of law enforcement agencies to buy their system and they could opt in. There’s some kind of legal innovation here where by making it a private database, they could just excuse themselves from the warrant process.

But the actual hardware of the cameras is not all that impressive. There’s something about that that I really just want to hone in on. The idea of the Flock camera being the problem is secondary to the Flock network being the problem.

One way that I think about it, in the defense of Flock cameras and even outside of Flock itself, is that it’s all happening in public. This is all in public view. It’s generally the same as arguing that you’re allowed to take a picture anywhere in public. So why can’t they do this?

My argument against that would be if you have a police officer follow someone or go through public traffic cams, which are all over the country, and go through every single public traffic cam and wait for your car to come and then write down when that was there and do that for 30 days, that’s generally a serial killer situation.

The amount of resources that you have to dump into that would have to justify that expense with a very serious crime. But doing that for somebody who stole steaks from a Kroger is very different. What worries me about it is that you might end up with police officers being able to get a lead on a case much easier that doesn’t necessarily need police for society to become safer in a better place, like a nonviolent crime or something that’s not a huge deal, rather than investigating more serious crimes.

That’s the argument that Flock makes, and that proponents of this technology make. We had Jamie Siminoff from Ring on the show, and the argument he would make is if you put enough cameras into certain neighborhoods, you will “zero out crime.” That is a thing that he has said to me in the context of Ring doorbells and floodlight cams.

It’s the same argument that proponents of Flock make. “We put up all these cameras, we can catch criminals, thus we will deter criminals, the crime rate will fall.” Do you buy into this?

No, I don’t. Because first of all, we’ve never tested this. We’ve never had a city in a vacuum where we put in a bunch of cameras. One of the metaphors I like to use is if you have a supermarket and you put one camera in one aisle where you think that things are going to get stolen, that will probably increase theft in other aisles rather than just assuming that every shoplifter is just going to become a plumber instead, like I’ll be a doctor instead of a shoplifter.

That doesn’t actually deal with the overall problem. If you have a Walmart that has cameras all over it, and then you have a neighborhood store that can’t afford all of those fancy cameras, then maybe the shoplifters and people who would hold up a store will go to that place instead and you have the same thing with cities. You have crime relocation happening.

So, yes, of course, if you put a camera above a street, it’s less likely that a car on that street within the view of the camera will get broken into. But does that make it more likely that a car a block over where there is no camera will get broken into? This is something that has been observable by criminologists, like crime relocation is a real thing. A lot of times effective policing just moves criminals elsewhere.

Selfishly, you could say, “In my subdivision, we have less crime, and I don’t care about anything other than that.” But over time, over the next decade, it doesn’t really work out that way. You end up with more crime overall, or you end up with bigger problems in society. So I would argue with that.

Also, we’ve seen that Ring cameras don’t really reduce crime all that much. You end up being able to see somebody stealing a package off your porch or you end up being able to see somebody breaking into your house. But do they actually increase clearance rates? I would argue I’ve not seen any evidence that they do.

You have to connect them to the nationwide database of license plate readers.

[Laughs] Right, yeah.

If you put a camera everywhere, you can’t relocate anywhere. That’s the argument. It’s the end point of the argument that they are making: “If putting up some cameras would move the crime, putting cameras everywhere would make that impossible and there will be no crime.”

With a lot of that stuff, it’s just like, “If you have a problem, if you’re worried that you’re going to have a porch pirate, if you’re worried that your house is going to be broken into, I’m not sure why you would jump to put cameras all over your house?”

It’s the same thing with cities, like why wouldn’t you just increase your insurance? You know, increase your insurance payoff or something like that, because that actually will get you new things and you know, the other one will just get you a police report with evidence that the police might not even be able to handle or will not be able to connect to any sort of criminal.

Because even if that criminal gets caught, it’s not like they’re just saving all the money to pay back their victims. It’s figuring stuff like that out. Another thing that I don’t like about surveillance in general, especially things like ALPRs, is that they’re not solving crime with embezzlement. They’re not solving crime with corruption. They’re not solving bigger crimes.

They’re really honing in on things like car theft and things like shoplifting out of a Lowe’s parking lot and then sharing that data with the police and then the police tracking the car two days later and pulling it over. Most of the time those crimes actually have solutions that are in broader public policy.

If somebody’s shoplifting from Lowe’s, I would assume they probably either have a drug problem or they have a problem with poverty, because I don’t want to shoplift from Lowe’s. I don’t have any desire to do that. It’s not a crime of passion. It’s a crime of necessity. I would say that like along the lines, like even if the clearance rates were improving, which I’ve not seen evidence of, what does that mean? Does that just mean that we’re putting more nonviolent offenders in prison or through the justice system? Does that actually make society safer?

We’re getting into the trade-offs of using technology to solve social problems. One of the most important trade-offs that you have brought to light repeatedly is that these devices are not secure.

So even if you solve the problem of “you should get a warrant” — or even if Flock responds to the public pressure and says, “We ought to make people type case numbers into the system before they start searching,” which was their big concession recently — even if you get to, “We’re going to control the system a little bit better,” the devices themselves are insecure. The network is insecure.

That means anybody can do almost anything they want with it. You’re a security researcher. Describe how you began digging into the security problems here and what the response has been.

Starting out, I found out that they didn’t, in early 2025, require multi-factor authentication. I also witnessed a police officer logging into Flock from a Wi-Fi network that wasn’t at a police station. Had you told me those things, I wouldn’t believe them. But witnessing it happening made me say, “This is something that needs more looking into.” I started thinking, “It’s probable at that point, because now you have human error.”

If all of these police departments are sharing data with one another, then it could just be the dispatcher, somebody who’s not even deputized, who has a Flock account at a rural Louisiana police department. That person could sell their account or that person could click the wrong link in an email and whatever. I started looking for Flock credentials on the dark web and I found some and they were coming from a Russian vendor.

I started thinking, “How exactly did that happen?” That’s how I met [cybersecurity researcher] Jon Gaines, and we found that a lot of the time there were hardware vulnerabilities in the camera where you could get them to open up a Wi-Fi access point, and then you could get complete control over the Android device and you could root it and have it do whatever you wanted in a way that would be undetectable because it’s happening outside of the Flock ecosystem on the device.

I had found a bunch of Flock cameras with administrative interfaces that were open on the internet. So you could just type in the IP address and then delete footage, or watch footage from 30 days ago. You could even put files on the device and look at all the logs. In all these situations, we found a lot of plain text credentials, things that shouldn’t have been there.

At first the pushback from the company was that I’m a YouTuber and I was doing magic tricks and I’m not a serious security researcher. Reading their own statement about having never been hacked through a Flock camera and then downloading it on my own machine made that indisputable.

They still disputed it for a while, but that is what really got the media involved and finally paying attention to it. Since then, it’s been smaller things that I’ve found, but more so the bigger deal here is that no matter if you’re using Flock or Axon or whatever it is — because now you have Axon and Motorola also launching their own private networks outside of the National Crime Information Center — the person on this network with the worst security hygiene is going to be as secure as the entire network will be. That’s the big problem.

If I were to have it my way, police officers would not have access to Flock at all. If I were to have it my way, you wouldn’t have this level of surveillance at all. But let’s just say if I were to have it my way on security policy, a police department would have one person who is trained and has a lot of security hygiene and privacy hygiene and is trained to look up Flock searches for police officers. But what we’re seeing is a lot of police chiefs who have Flock accounts. Why would a police chief ever even need to use this service? It’s their job to manage the department.

In the action movie, the cops usually have to bribe the person with access to the surveillance tool with cookies and booze to run a search without a warrant, right?

Yeah, and they usually have bifocals and are really smart.

We’ve been conditioned to think that’s how it should work. At the very least, there should be some light bribery involved, not free access. I am not a security expert by any means. I’ve been covering tech for a long time, and it just strikes me that there are some very basic concepts about security that Flock in particular missed.

The idea that we have open access, there are no access controls, that they were practicing what is called security by obscurity. You could just drive a truck through it and they would deny it. All that seems very basic. Is it just that they’re a startup and they didn’t know any better?

I think they knew better and they didn’t have to do anything about it, because nobody made them. Because somehow across America, police departments and city councils and senators and your federal government allowed these cameras to be put up everywhere without any type of security test or any type of security protocol, any type of triage for what to do if something goes wrong. None of that exists.

Circling back, when I’m actually sitting there in front of the Senate, I’m not going to say, “I can’t believe how bad Flock is.” Flock is a for-profit tech startup. Of course they’re going to do whatever they can to stay competitive. That’s their job that we give them as a society. The job of a legislator is to protect us from them. Because even when we yell at police for the privacy stuff, you wouldn’t consider a police officer or a police department to be Fourth Amendment defenders. They would be on the other side of that argument.

We need somebody on the side that actually defends people’s privacy. Our government has been utterly asleep at the wheel, especially when it comes to security vulnerabilities, but that’s across the board. That’s everywhere. Right now, it’s actually a really terrifying time that we’re in.

You recently testified in front of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism. That was a hearing about Flock. That subcommittee is chaired by Josh Hawley, who’s a Republican. He opened a probe into Flock.

I’m curious about that experience, preparing for that testimony and what message you wanted to send. But I just want to note that it is remarkable that a Republican is holding hearings into law enforcement technology and whether or not it’s appropriate, and that’s happening across the country.

What do you make of that? That it’s this bipartisan? Is it that everyone’s just woken up to civil liberties? This is a convenient punching bag, and everyone hates tech? How do you see the shape of it?

For any politician at the Senate level, there’s going to be theater. I don’t consider that to be a meeting where there’s going to be a solution at the end.

But what I did do there, in full transparency, is I wanted to testify with the C-SPAN cameras on in front of a Senate committee, explaining that things like FISA 702 or CORCA — these things that a lot of these politicians, even some people on that subcommittee, co-sponsored — are massive risks to privacy and security.

Because you can’t say that they didn’t know when an expert witness who’s a hacker told them in testimony. That’s ultimately why I went to Washington, DC, because I knew that it would be basically just a bunch of people proudly saying that they’re angry at Flock because everybody’s angry at Flock.

A lot of the things in Hawley’s proposals are things that Flock is already kind of doing, in their own defense, which is good news. It’s not to choose one over the other. Both are actually taking positions that are big compromises from where they probably stood a year or two years ago.

It was a wild experience. It was strange. They expected me to just talk about how bad Flock was. I really didn’t really see a purpose to that. If I wanted to scream about how bad Flock is now, I would just contact somebody at Flock and say, “We need to talk about this. I’m really mad about the security vulnerability,” because they do talk to me now. If I find a security vulnerability, I tell them about it and they take it seriously. Of course it took a lot of damage for them to take me seriously.

But if I’m standing in front of the Senate, I’m going to say, “Why don’t you do something? Because this is your job and this is what we voted for you to do.” As far as the bipartisan stuff, I’m really happy about it, honestly. It’s great. It’s awesome to see our country agree on anything as a whole right now. That’s wonderful.

A lot of Republicans remember COVID and they remember mask mandates and stuff and they probably imagine what a Flock camera would do in that situation. It might automatically send them a ticket or an arrest warrant for leaving their house during lockdown. Who knows? But that is all related to privacy risks and authoritarianism and it’s all very real in their memory.

It is interesting to see a lot of politicians take the side of ICE and take the side of the National Guard driving into a city where the police department doesn’t even want them there, and then also be anti-Flock or anti-surveillance. It’s an interesting time.

There’s something there. One of my early career rookie mistakes was that I covered telecom companies and ISPs as a baby blogger at AOL and I got it into my head that I should testify in front of Congress to talk about how the ISPs were charging everybody too much money.

I called the general counsel and the policy office at AOL and I said, “Can you get me in front of Congress?” They said, “About what?” And I said, “The ISPs are bad,” and they went, “You know, we’re an ISP,” and that was the end of that conversation. It didn’t go any farther.

[Laughs] You definitely need a lawyer if you’re going to testify in front of the Senate. There are a lot of legal expenses involved. It’s pretty stressful all in all. I feel like a lot of people think it’s a lucky thing, but  it’s a very stressful two weeks of your life.

You are in the center of that swirl, and it is bipartisan. I would put up surveillance and data centers as the issues that are uniting Americans today. Are you hearing from both sides? Did you sit with Republican senators individually? I’m sure you hear from regular people on both sides of the aisle.

Is it really that we don’t want the government to spy on us, so we’re going to yell at these cameras? Or is it bigger than that?

I think, and what I hope, is that when people discover what’s going on with Flock, and what’s going on with other police surveillance technology, they also don’t immediately go to misinformation, because that’s what a lot of people do. A lot of people will hear about the Flock cameras and then they’ll go, “How is Israel involved in this?” Then they immediately go down that rabbit hole on X or 4chan and then it builds this conspiracy theory that’s completely not in parity with the actual problem that we’re trying to solve.

What always entertains me so much about those types of conspiracies is that reality is just as crazy. It’s just as wild. There’s just as much outrage in reality. Somehow conspiracies are more attractive, even though on many occasions they’re not even as interesting as reality.

LexisNexis, for example, is a data broker that police use, that your car uses, that your devices sell data to constantly. If people knew the average amount of data that this data broker has about them that’s being sold and traded constantly, I feel like their anger about Flock would be completely eclipsed by it.

Can I connect those thoughts? I’ve been thinking about this a lot. Five years ago, we could confidently write a story debunking the notion that Instagram was listening to you. [Instagram CEO] Adam Mosseri, this poor man, has to make a video once a week insisting that he is not listening to you. Part of the reason that five years ago we would be confident in writing that story is the technological cost of listening to every Instagram user and figuring out what they had said to serve you ads was actually very high.

It was much cheaper to say, “You were on your friend’s Wi-Fi network six months ago, they searched for vacations, we’re going to serve you the ads and the coincidence will be astounding and you will believe that we’re listening to you, but it’s actually just a bunch of like data matrix synthesis, right? But that’s going to be very effective.”

We could write that story and say, “Actually you were in the same place at the same time. There’s no way they’re listening to you, it would be too expensive.” But here in 2026, I’m not sure I can make that claim anymore. Everyone wants to listen to you all the time. The amount of databases that we are synthesizing have skyrocketed all the way to “I’ve seen all the license plates on all the highways at all times, and the police chief has that data.”

How do you regain a sense of privacy? There’s a part of me that says so many people believe their phones are listening to them that you can never claw your way back, that you can never end the conspiracy theory.

The “phone listening to you” thing is so interesting to me because it’s one of those perfect examples of conspiracy versus reality, where if somebody is having a discussion about something, like that they want to get a horse. Weird example. But I was thinking about learning how to ride a horse. You have that discussion with your partner and then later on that day, you get a suggestion or an ad for horse-riding lessons on your phone. The conclusion and the conspiracy theory is my phone is listening to my conversations.

That’s pretty reasonable until you find out that it’s very inefficient for them to do so. The crazy part is that you’ve been giving subtle hints to Meta, to Google, and to all these companies and they have an algorithm that can figure out that you’re going to want horse-riding lessons and so when you feel like your phone’s been recording your conversations, it’s almost like this glitch in the matrix where you have a moment to realize how powerful the algorithm actually is at predicting what you’re about to think. That is scary and that’s not a conspiracy. That’s actually how it works.

That always boggles my mind like that. Wow, look at the real thing happening because it’s so much crazier than the conspiracy is. Of course they could listen to you. There are a lot of devices that listen to you that say they’re using your data to self-improve. Tesla listens to you. Like there’s a lot of different services and products.

But the scary part is that listening to your conversation is one of the least efficient and least valuable things it could do because it already has so much more important information. What you’re communicating verbally is usually not nearly as valuable as just your subtle pattern.

Yeah, and your transaction history. I guess what I’m getting at is again, five years ago, I would say some version of that all the time: “They’re not listening to you. The real thing is way scarier and listening to you isn’t valuable.” And it would be costly. You have to store all this audio, you have to process it, you have to figure it out. And now it feels like actually it’s not costly. It is happening all around us all the time.

If I look at Flock, the problems break down into two buckets. One, the very idea of a private database that anyone can search without controls is bad. And we should legislate a bunch of controls around that thing. And then two, letting a startup kind of YOLO that technology into the world without any security best practices, equally bad. These are two different problems that have come together to create a privacy disaster.

But even if you think Axon or Motorola will have better security, you’ve got the first problem, which is you need controls around these private networks. All that in my mind is right next to the conspiracy style thinking you’re describing, where it’s technologically plausible that all the bad things are happening.

I can’t rule them out anymore. My Apple Watch might just make transcripts of all the meetings without anyone’s permission. The loophole you describe in our legal system for years, the idea that you don’t have privacy in public, has been a lodestar. It is just foundational, and now people don’t love that anymore. Because the idea that you don’t have privacy in public enables a bunch of people to do a bunch of things people don’t like.

Maybe we should rethink that as a moral, ethical, and legal matter, but we’re nowhere close to that. I just feel like all that is pouring fuel on the conspiracy theories. You’re in the center of the storm here, and so I’m wondering if you can find a rational set of policy outcomes here that tamps down on those flames.

A little over a year ago, when my first video on Flock came out, if the company’s response and the government’s response to it was, “Audit logs are now going to be open and they’re going to exist on something that uses immutable data storage. It could be the blockchain, could be WORM or something like that. Basically, anybody can look at them, anybody can own them, nobody can change them…”

If they said that, then they immediately went and fixed all the security vulnerabilities and you just had a smarter way of looking at these things… Also one thing that would have been really interesting around them is to be able to go to your DMV and show them your license and opt out.

You could say, “I’ve not been convicted of a felony, I’ve not done anything wrong, I don’t want to be tracked.” And then all of a sudden, when a Flock license plate reader detects your plate, it says “opt out,” unless a cop puts you on a hot list because you’ve murdered someone or something like that. These are all reasonable compromises that could have been made with relatively little expense.

But now a year later, who’s going to trust anybody who makes those compromises? Now there’s no trust anymore because of that. Because Flock dug its heels in so much, and because police departments constantly gaslit everybody over and over again with, “There’s no abuse, there’s no record of abuse. We’re checking it. We’re checking these audit logs constantly. It makes you safer. If you take these cameras down, your kids are going to go missing.” That type of thing.

Now how can you fix this? Now people are just destroying cameras. Now, people are just threatening executives of these companies because that’s what they do when they get taken this far out.

That’s my big problem now. If I have any goal in this or any dog in this fight, I’d like to bring people back towards solutionism, because I don’t want surveillance at all, but we don’t live in Benn Jordistan. We live in a democracy and a lot of people are okay with it to some degree. Most people are not okay with it, from polling I’ve done, if it doesn’t involve a warrant.

Somewhere along there is a solution where nobody’s happy, but everybody’s content. If I could do anything right now, it would be bringing people back towards a path where a solution can be found.

One of the things I’ve been thinking about a lot is the widespread assumption that surveillance does exist. When there’s some high profile crime, the assumption that there will be cameras that will show us something about this crime actually kind of redounds in favor of the surveillance companies. Ring had an ad at the Super Bowl about tracking lost dogs. They got in a lot of trouble over what else we’re going to do with this surveillance network.

I think it was a week later that Savannah Guthrie’s mom was kidnapped and Jamie was on every news network in town saying Ring cameras are going to solve it, whether or not the footage that we saw was even from Ring cameras.

There was this notion that surveillance would help. That is a real pendulum swing back and forth. The cameras are the solution at one time and the abstract concept of the cameras makes people mad because why are you passively surveilling me? You’re talking about solutions. How do you thread that needle?

Most people need to understand, especially police departments, that most of the things that are being promised by people like Garrett Langley, the CEO of Flock, and Jamie Siminoff, the CEO of Ring, are their sales tactics. These CEOs or executives or anybody from any company, they’re not actually going out and doing this research in a way where they’re not cherry-picking data and looking for statistics that support their product.

You could say that’s unethical, you could say that’s wrong, but that’s what you expect from a tech company. Nobody believes that a tech company would all of a sudden become a humanitarian while they’re still representing their company. We could take that and we could isolate that, and then we say, “Research needs to be done,” and research is very, very complicated for this.

In sociology and criminology, we don’t even understand if increasing police reduces crime as a society. We’ve not even proven that. Putting cameras up is a really big ask. We just need to be asking these questions a lot more, and being more careful about putting these cameras up. What will they actually help?

If we could find something that actually helps, we could say, “We have a lot of cars being stolen in this neighborhood. Hey guys, how do you feel about an ALPR that has 24 hours of retention time coming up in this neighborhood and everything that we search on it will be in an immutable audit log that you’ll be able to see every single day? How do you feel about that?” I feel like a lot more people would say, “Yeah, I don’t want my car stolen.” They would maybe err on the side of trying something to reduce a crime problem rather than the police just behind closed doors signing a multi-million dollar contract to put cameras up all over the city without asking anyone.

That’s one of the first solutions. Transparency in general. If I were running Flock in some weird parallel universe, a year ago when Have I Been Flocked? came out — the website that allows you to search your own license plate — I would have immediately partnered with them. I would have said, “Here’s all our data. Thank you for running this. Let’s give you some money so you can keep this server running fast. Because I want everybody to not be mad at us. I want everybody to understand what’s going on.”

A lot of it comes down to quantifying things at a local level to see what people want, and maybe even having referendums in certain places. Referendums are usually really tricky and you have your Brexit situations with referendums, but sometimes they’re also useful.

For a general person watching this right now, the one thing that I strongly urge is to find out who’s voting for this stuff. Find out who actually signed the paperwork to spend the money on it without any form of security vulnerability check, without any sort of special license or any sort of audit data, without going through anything else, because that person is typically a city council member and you can run and be one of those quite easily.

It’s not that difficult. Most city council members that I’ve met are just like me, just like my viewers. They’re not these prestigious politicians. It’s something that most people could do if they have a few friends helping them campaign.

You said immutable record again and it reminded me that earlier you earned the distinction of being the only person on Decoder to ever suggest the blockchain as a solution for something in a way that did not immediately imply that you would make a bunch of money. I want to congratulate you for that.

[Laughs] It’s interesting that all of this ALPR stuff blew up at the same time that crypto and blockchain and NFTs blew up. Yet nobody ever thought, “Hey, we could use a proof-of-stake network, one that’s not actually scorching the Earth to solve Sudoku puzzles, but we can actually use a highly efficient proof-of-stake network to immutably store data for these audit logs.”

But it’s not too late. These things still exist. You don’t have to use blockchain. There’s IPFS, which is a decentralized file system. There’s WORM, which is “write once, read many.” That’s a thing that IBM, I think, invented, but it’s used everywhere. There are a lot of ways to do immutable data, but it being democratized data is what’s the most important part.

[Laughs] We’re not using the GPUs for Sudoku puzzles anymore. We’re running them red hot for other stuff. Don’t worry. We switched those over.

You mentioned working with the companies. You mentioned the idea that Flock is now partnering with some of its critics, which would have helped them early. They have invited you in, right? One of your strongest calls is for external auditors and researchers to evaluate these systems. It’s one of the things you said was needed in your congressional hearing.

They’ve invited you in. You’re now a third-party reviewer with Flock. What is your relationship with Flock like now? And do you think it’s changed how you view and evaluate the company?

There are certainly people at the company who really dislike me. And then there are people at the company… I’ve spoken to the CEO. I’ve spoken to a couple of the executives. There are people at the company who are absolutely willing to have a conversation and figure out what a solution actually looks like. Unfortunately, and I say “unfortunately” because throwing poop is really easy, but cleaning up the room so people can sit in it again without smelling poop is really hard, and most people are only willing to do the throwing poop part.

But one thing that happens in our society all too often is when we have a big controversy, especially on social media, and then there is no remediation at all. There’s no allowance for remediation. If you think about somebody getting canceled or something, one thing I always think is, “What do you want them to do? What should they do now? Do you have any ideas or should they just die?” Because that’s not a solution.

We can’t just snap our fingers. If, in the next month, Flock just said, “We can’t do it anymore. We’re going out of business. We quit. We’re going to make toys or something else, or we’re going to just leave,” Axon, Verkada, Palantir, and all these other companies would just step in and do the exact same thing and they would learn from Flock’s mistakes and do it more efficiently.

We’re in a place right now where, had Flock not dug their heels in and not listened to press strategies that make them seem more confident than they actually are, and actually had listened to people and maybe worked on a solution — it’s going to be rough and I’m going to get a lot of hate for even suggesting that that’s a thing — but if we actually want to solve this problem, we have to do that.

You have to have an olive branch. You could still hit back. You can still wear a boxing glove in one hand, but you have to have an olive branch in the other one. Otherwise, I can’t fix this myself as a YouTuber. One of the more powerful things — and this is almost two months ago — was someone high up at Flock said, “We want guardrails. Give us some guardrails. Just tell us what to do. Tell us what to do, and we’ll make the changes we need to do and stay in business and grow that way. But we need those guardrails.”

Unfortunately, the people who make those guardrails are just saying, “I don’t like Flock. Flock is bad.” They’re not actually setting these guardrails up. You also have a lot of different bills being passed around election time. I just wish a lot of these people would get together in one room with Flock and make a decision on what they think would be best to move forward.

You’ve made some very aggressive YouTube videos about Flock. One of my favorites was you went to the Flock Forward convention where they banned you. They canceled your hotel room, and then you set up Wi-Fi scanners and Bluetooth scanners outside. You figured out who was there.

This is perfect stunt journalism. I watched that video and I went, “I should stop running this fussy web magazine and I should just do this.” It was a great video with a super aggressive posture towards Flock.

Can you still be in that mode when you’re in the company trying to help create solutions?

It’s a great question that I think about all the time. It’s really difficult to be a journalist in that type of situation where you’re talking to the company and you’re producing things that harm the company or its public image at the same time.

At the end of the day, you just can’t lie. You just have to be as honest as possible, which is one of the reasons I’m even saying that I’ve spoken to the Flock CEO and stuff like that. Because I just want to have a 360-degree understanding and find out as much information as I possibly can, and then let my viewers decide how they feel about that.

Maybe the only thing I really want to guide them toward at this point is away from things like violence, away from things like threatening the CEO, because that actually makes us less safe as a society. That also makes cops more likely to put cameras up everywhere. It’s not a very good way of dealing with the issue and also just threatening or terrorizing people’s families is not a solution for anything.

That’s a question I think about constantly because it’s really, really hard to navigate this ethically, knowing that your next story might hurt the person you just had a conversation with, or vice versa, that the person you just had a conversation with might actually make your audience think less of you or judge you in some way.

But I truly do believe that if you hang onto nuance as much as possible, and if you’re always sort of letting nuance guide you, that in the long term it’ll be very bumpy, but in the long term you’ll be rewarded for it. That’s maybe why my channel gets the views it does. I hope, or I like to think that, and maybe it’s egotistical to think that, but I think it’s because I always try to hang on to nuance to some extent.

I always say, “To be fair,” and then look at that side because otherwise I’m just making content that’s telling people how to think. Whereas I feel like people want to be led on a mission to discover things and learn about things and then come up with their own opinion afterwards.

I’m glad you brought this up because I wanted to end with a little bit of you as a YouTuber, as a person who tries to gain an audience on these platforms. One of my longstanding jokes on the show is every YouTuber gets their wings when they make a video about how mad they are at YouTube, about the algorithm or demonetization or whatever YouTube thing.

Marques Brownlee just made a video about how mad he is at YouTube about A/B testing. It took a long time, but here we are. You’re describing succeeding on an algorithmic platform with nuance, with data, and with journalism. I look at the algorithmic platforms and I think that doesn’t exist.

What’s your relationship like there? If you’re a self-described YouTuber, are you on the road to becoming MrBeast? Can you still fight the fight?

I don’t try to analyze it. If I get a video that doesn’t have a million views or something, I don’t say that video is a failure. I think that video really worked probably for the demographic that watched it and then it didn’t work for another slice of the demographic. In terms of nuance, enough people are exhausted from being told how to think about it and they feel like they’re being worked nonstop when they’re on social media and watching things.

Maybe that nuance helps my channel provide some form of relief from that. I try to do better and better. And it’s interesting because maybe my content will be less exciting if I try to be more and more nuanced. But I speak to a lot of journalists. Brendan Keefe from Atlanta News First is a great example. I would almost consider him a mentor at this point because he’s extremely rigid with his nuance and with his ethics.

A good example is that Flock Forward thing that you mentioned. Before that, I had found the entire guest list. I had opened up and downloaded the app and then decompiled the app and probed it and found the entire guest list and a bunch of information about all of the guests who were going to Flock Forward. This is valuable info. These are police officers and senators, and most of these guests, our tax dollars paid for them to fly to Atlanta to come to this event.

Immediately I told a couple of journalists and they said, “Yes, give it to me,” and I thought to myself, like, “No, this is wrong. I need to report this to the company if I want to actually have principles. If I want to stay on this side of things, if I want to be able to tell police that they can’t search their wives because it’s personal information that they’re not supposed to see, then I also can’t release breach data.” It’s those types of things that are really hard. That would have been a banger video for me to release that guest list. But over the long run, that actually pays off.

People just watch your content and feel like you’re more trustworthy, which is the number one area where people struggle with YouTube or any sort of social media, because you have to somehow say, “I actually have standards and ethics and I’m going to try and tell you the truth in this crazy noise.” That’s what I’m trying to do. I don’t know if I’m going to achieve it, but that’s a big goal of mine.

I can’t agree with that more. Anybody who listens to our other show The Vergecast knows that I prattle on about our ethics policy all the time. In this media environment, you actually have to make the subtext text and say, “I made this information this way. This process generated this outcome.” It’s the process that you actually are buying from me, not the headline.

There’s something about that that I think is very challenging on a platform like YouTube. That’s why I asked about it. Because you can see what the platform naturally wants to do and you’ve managed to grow a lot with very in-depth coverage about very wonky topics that our elected officials would maybe prefer not to know about and that’s a success.

I’m just wondering if you fight the platform’s dynamics openly and explicitly, if you think about them, or if you’re just riding the wave.

My ultimate wish — which you know, unfortunately isn’t going to come true — is that I can make a video about Unitree robots, let’s say, and then find a security vulnerability, find a backdoor, which I did, and then some of my viewers actually take that research and improve on it and make it better. And then continue doing that, and then that actually results in something bigger and then I’m able to just move on to something else entirely.

It doesn’t work that way. I’m still talking about Flock, and I’m still talking about data centers. I’m still talking about storing an image in a bird. All these things I’m still constantly connected to.

But looking past just the views and retention and looking towards the reason I made that Flock Forward video was because a lot of my viewers saw that and said, “Whoa, whoa, whoa, what is that? A [software-defined radio]? You can listen to that stuff. How do you do that?” And now they’re into radio, which is crazy. There are so many more interesting things than listening to a bunch of Flock employees talking on a wireless microphone with radio.

It encourages people to sort of explore with tools that they could pretty easily obtain. I hope that that results in more people doing more interesting things in collecting and processing data in ways that actually help the world.

I can’t think of a better place to leave it than there. Benn, thank you so much for being on Decoder. Like I said, this was a dream come true.

Thank you for having me. I appreciate it.