Susan Ouellette - Award-Winning Thriller Author

Look at the code WIRED pulled from Flock’s own servers. Flock built an AI tool called OS Investigate.🚨👀 It accesses "commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates." It also accesses "police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records." The prompts can generate dossiers ("workups") on people based purely on driving patterns, without a crime, a plate, or a name. It Can identify drivers, track patterns, find "witnesses," generate suspicion based on behavior without a target. Code was found publicly on Flock's website. 🚨 Flock is performing automated, suspicionless background checks (pulling SSNs, DOBs, relatives) using commercial databases on citizens who have committed no crime, have no warrant, and are not named in any case file. The trigger is purely an AI algorithm flagging their driving pattern. 🚨 NO officer initiates the search for the suspect, Flock's AI essentially acting as the investigator, but doing so through commercial data brokers. Flock pulls consumer reports without a permissible purpose. ⚠️⚠️ Why did Flock build OS Investigate? Because selling LPR cameras is a hardware game with limits. Selling an "AI investigator" is a high-margin SaaS play. To justify the valuation ($1B+), they need to monopolize the investigative workflow. To do that, they fused LPR data (which they hold) with police records (CJI) and commercial data (SSNs). ⚠️ Why are they doing this? Because Flock’s hardware is a commodity. The cameras are just metal on a pole. The real valuation the nearly $1 billion in venture capital is in their proprietary datasets. To justify that valuation, they have to build a total surveillance map of America that links physical movement to full digital and financial identities. They cannot legally buy that data on the open market because of the FCRA. So they built an AI to force the police to pull it for them. Flock gets the fused data, the police get the dossier, and Flock gets to declare the new AI-generated identity maps as "Flock Property" under their contracts. ⚠️⚠️ Flock is using the police as a legal shield to run unauthorized mass identity resolution queries for their own proprietary training and profit. The "perpetual license" terms gives Flock ownership of these AI-generated dossiers. They are building a national private surveillance database of SSNs linked to movement patterns, bypassing the FCRA by routing the queries through police terminals.🚨 Now look at their new August 2026 "Trust" updates. They announced a reduction in data retention to 7 days, but they created an exception called "Evidence Mode" where searched data is preserved instead of aging out. 🚨 Here is the trap. If they actually deleted data in 7 days, their AI prompts which ask for people "arrested more than twice in two years" would not function.🚨 The AI needs a multi-year historical window to track patterns. "Evidence Mode" is the backdoor they built to force all searched data into permanent retention so their AI can keep running. The 7-day retention is theater for the city councils. The permanent retention is the actual product.🚨 And the Audit Assistance" they say is to catch police misuse? It is a complete deception. The audit logs track the police officer. But the AI generates the lead before the officer interacts with the system. The AI does the suspicionless searching in the backend. The officer just clicks the prewritten prompt. The audit log captures the officer clicking a button, but it does not capture the unauthorized API calls Flock’s AI is making to the commercial databases to pull the SSNs. They built the logging system to cover their own corporate trail.🚨 wired.com/story/flock-safety…