Flock's New AI Police Tool Can Track Drivers Without a Name or License Plate

In brief

• Flock Safety's OS Investigate ships with 69 prewritten prompts that give police AI access to plate scans, arrest records, and commercial databases holding Social Security numbers and relatives.
• Wired reports that 41 of the prompts require no special permission, and 14 need no plate, name, or description— just a place, a time, and a pattern of behavior.
• One prompt finds a car's "associates" by how often other vehicles appear at the same cameras within two minutes, flipping Flock's promise that it doesn't track people.

Flock Safety, the surveillance company whose cameras log vehicles across more than 6,000 U.S. communities, has built an AI tool that can identify and follow drivers using nothing but their movement.

The findings come in a report from Wired after it pulled the system's code from files on Flock's own site served to anyone who loaded its login pages.

The software—first called Nightshift, now renamed OS Investigate—is still in development and in testing with a small group of law enforcement partners, the company said.

An officer opens a chat box and picks from a menu of 69 canned prompts, or writes their own. One built-in query lists "witnesses" as the vehicles most seen in a neighborhood over the past two weeks.