The surveillance contractor Flock Safety <\/span>argues<\/span><\/a> that police customers don’t need a warrant to track drivers with its automated license plate reading cameras because drivers have “no reasonable expectation of privacy” on public roads. So YouTube host Benn Jordan applied the same logic back on Flock. He sat outside Flock’s recent <\/span>police convention<\/span><\/a> in Atlanta with radio equipment and a drone, which he used to unmask attendees and even listen to microphones inside the convention hall.<\/span><\/p>\n

“Flock values their privacy. Oh well,” Jordan <\/span>wrote<\/span><\/a> in the title of his video on the convention.<\/span><\/p>\n

His plans didn’t quite start out that way. Jordan, an early and outspoken critic of Flock, wanted to visit the convention to see what the relationship between police and the company was like after a <\/span>string of cases<\/span><\/a> in Georgia involving police misusing Flock products, he tells <\/span>Reason<\/span><\/i>. After downloading the conference app, he looked inside the source code and found that it revealed the entire guest list. Jordan alerted Flock to the data breach.<\/span><\/p>\n

Once the company caught wind that Jordan was coming, it canceled his tickets. But the attempts to keep Jordan out went further than that. An employee from Flock called the hotel to cancel Jordan’s room reservation, which he had booked himself, according to a video Jordan posted<\/a> of a call with the hotel. <\/span>(Flock did not respond to <\/span>Reason<\/span><\/i>‘s request for comment.) Jordan even found out that all of the rest of the rooms and even the parking lots surrounding the hotel had been booked.<\/span><\/p>\n

Still, he was able to find a public parking spot within view of the hotel, where he parked a van with dozens of WiFi adapters, a parabolic dish antenna, and a dipole array. This equipment picked up the signal from the convention hall’s wireless microphones, allowing Jordan to hear attendees’ conversations. “Everything was on public channels,” he says. Then he used a drone to photograph attendees walking out and used facial recognition to figure out their identities.<\/span><\/p>\n