Watching the Watchers

Hawley, who is chairman of the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, wrote to Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley last week requesting his cooperation with an investigation into the company’s collection, retention and dissemination of the data generated by its cameras.

Noting that the thousands-strong Flock camera network conducts more than 20 billion vehicle scans every month, Hawley said that the “overwhelming majority of the Americans captured in those records did nothing wrong”.

“Instead of serving discrete local investigations, as contemplated by our constitutional processes and safeguards, these camera networks harness artificial intelligence to pool what they capture into a national database that customers can search”, Hawley wrote in his 26 August letter.

The senator listed a number of abuses of the Flock camera system reported by American media in recent months, including the case of a civilian employee of the St. Charles County Police Department who resigned in August after receiving notice of termination following an audit that found Flock searches had been run for personal reasons, “completely unrelated to their law enforcement duties”.

Another case discussed by the senator was that of former Milwaukee police officer Josue Ayala, who pleaded guilty after searching his girlfriend’s license plate 124 times and her former boyfriend’s plate 55 times, entering “investigation” as his justification each time. Ayala was sentenced in July to probation and a $500 fine.

Hawley additionally raised the problems of errors resulting from the use of the Flock system by law enforcement and uncertainty about how Flock and its customers can sell or use data collected by the network.

“To be sure, I want law enforcement to have tools to catch offenders and keep the public safe”, Hawley wrote, adding that “Americans do not surrender their privacy rights when they drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to church”.

The Missouri senator concluded his letter by asking that Langley prepare the requested documentation by 8 September this year to aid the investigation into the relationship between Flock cameras and privacy rights, and the way the former may be negatively impacting the latter.

Flock Unites Left and Right

The Flock privacy fight appears to be one capable of uniting the Left and the Right in America, with prominent left-wing voices and organizations expressing concerns about the rapidly advancing technology as well.

Foremost among these is the formally nonpartisan, but typically progressive, American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), which is running the campaign “Fight Creepy ALPR Cameras”.

“Automatic license plate reader (ALPR) companies like Flock Safety are quietly trying to build a nationwide mass surveillance system. If there are Flock cameras in your city, they are tracking, logging, and sharing your movements without a warrant”, the ACLU warns readers of its campaign page. 

“But we're not powerless. More and more communities are rejecting these creepy cameras – and yours can be one of them”, it says.

The ACLU says that what distinguishes Flock cameras from regular traffic or CCTV cameras is the combination of the extensive data captured and the AI cataloging that forms the foundation of the customer-searchable database.

Flock, for its part, is aware of the rising tide of criticism and is attempting to respond.

In a blog post issued in August, Langley announced that his company was cutting default data retention to seven days, making misuse detection mandatory for every customer and “inviting the rest of the industry to meet the same standard”.

According to the Flock CEO, when the company was launched almost a decade ago, the default ALPR data retention period was set to 30 days. However, Langley cited Flock analysis indicating that over 90% of searches without a full plate are done within a week.

In response to circulating stories of system abuse, Flock intends to make Audit Assistance, its abnormal behavior detector, mandatory for law enforcement agencies by the end of this year and also plans to institute a “proactive lockout”. This would see a user’s access automatically suspended pending administrator review when their activity meets “defined criteria for abnormal behavior”.

The changes are unlikely to ease the controversy surrounding the cameras, as a wave of vandalism targeting Flock LPRs, sometimes referred to as “deflocking”, intensifies.