The surveillance firm Flock Safety has told the public for years that its cameras “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a tool that does both, according to a new investigation. The artificial-intelligence system lets police search for people and vehicles by their patterns of movement alone. It needs no licence plate, no name, and no crime to start from, WIRED reported on Tuesday.
WIRED reporters Dhruv Mehrotra and Dell Cameron said they reconstructed the tool from files exposed through Flock’s own login pages. The code showed its prompts, its search forms and its intended workflows, they said. It did not reveal the model’s underlying instructions or the checks applied on Flock’s servers.
Flock first called the system Nightshift, and now calls it OS Investigate. The tool can connect vehicle scans with police case files and arrest records, according to WIRED. It can also pull in 911 dispatch logs, ballistics results and commercial identity databases. That turns Flock’s network of cameras from a record of where cars have been into an engine for generating suspects.
Searching by behaviour
Some searches start with ordinary police work, WIRED said. An officer can enter a plate and ask for vehicles seen near it. Others run the logic in reverse. One prompt looks for likely witnesses, finding the vehicles most often seen in a neighbourhood over the past 14 days. Another flags vehicles that visited three or more shops in three days.
