In this episode of the Security Ledger Podcast (#188), sponsored* by LastPass, we take a look at the fast-expanding world of crowdsourced surveillance by doing a deep dive on Flock Safety, a start up that sells inexpensive license plate scanners to homeowners and police departments. Also: users know that password security is important…but they can’t seem to change their insecure behavior. In our second segment, We talk about why with Katie Petrillo of LogMeIn and LastPass.

Flying in Surveillance’s Gray Zone

Like many technology entrepreneurs, Garret Langley’s company started with a question that he just couldn’t answer. The solve rate for property crime in his community outside Atlanta was pitifully low. Just one in six property crimes like break ins and car thefts nationally was ever solved.

The problem, Langley came to understand, is a lack of hard evidence: without a clear way to tie criminals to a crime scene, it is difficult for local law enforcement to even make arrests, let alone win convictions. 

Garrett Langley is the Founder and CEO of Flock Safety

More license plate readers would help, the police told him. But licensing so called Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) technology is prohibitively expensive. 

Like many entrepreneurs before him Langley found salvation in his pocket: his iPhone. Consumer smart phones, Langley realized, have all the components needed to function as capable ALPR cameras. All they needed was some weather proofing, an Internet connection and the software to manage the video feeds captured by the phones.

The company that grew out of that revelation was Flock Safety, a start up in the surveillance market that sells inexpensive Automated License Plate Reader (ALPR) cameras to law enforcement, home owners associations and individuals. But the growing use of ALPRs, including by individuals raises a host of privacy and civil liberties concerns.

Episode 84: Free Alexa! Cory Doctorow on jailbreaking Voice Assistants and hacking diversity with Rapid7’s Corey Thomas

In our first segment of this week’s podcast, we do a deep dive on Flock. First, we interview Garrett about how Flock got started, how its inexpensive ALPR technology works and how the company is trying to navigate the “gray zone” of public safety, civil liberties and privacy that its technology inhabits.

Dave Maass is a Senior Investigative Researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF)

For a better understanding of those tensions, we also invited Dave Maass, a senior investigative researcher at The Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF), into the studio. In our conversation, Dave says that the growth of consumer surveillance gear like Flock and the Ring smart doorbell raise serious privacy and civil liberties concerns for U.S. citizens, who increasingly inhabit a world saturated with private and publicly owned surveillance technology. 

Password Security: Consistently Bad

In our second segment this week, we have some good news: Internet users are well aware of the danger posed by weak or re-used passwords. Now the bad news: for more than three years,