Kashmir Hill

speaker

457 appearances 4 recordings 3 series first heard Dec 2025 last heard 31 Aug

Kashmir Hill’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 4 in all, peaking in Dec 2025 with 2.

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The Daily · How Flock Cameras Took Over America · 31 Aug 2026 podcast

So he decided to create this product along with two of his classmates from Georgia Tech.

they wanted to make cheap license plate readers, basically put a phone together with a solar panel

that you could put on street poles and it would just get photos of cars that were driving past.

Flock first started selling these to homeowners associations, kind of like an automated neighborhood watch.

So you could, you know, see who was coming and going, if there was a package theft, you could see well what car was there and drove away.

And just a few months after they start installing these devices, Langley said that he got a call from the police telling him that it was helping to solve crime.

So in 2020, the company starts working for the first time with a police department in Jersey Village, Texas.

And this kind of changes the business model.

Instead of putting it on private streets, you're starting to put it on public roads.

And the business really exploded from there.

They started working with police departments around the country.

And with that expansion has come a kind of growing backlash as communities are discovering that these cameras are there and how they're being used.

So, what these cameras allow police departments to do is essentially to track cars.

Most of the departments keep the photos of the cars for 30 days.

That's the default that Flock has in place.

And so if somebody goes missing, or if there is some kind of crime that is committed and you know the car associated with the crime, you can go looking for it.

You can see

where it's been, you can see where it's gone.

You can also set up alerts.

So if there is a car you're looking for, it'll shoot up an alert to any police that are using this network, whether it's in your community or in a different community.

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