Wherever anyone has gone in the United States, Flock knows it.
Flock’s cameras, a police technology company that tracks vehicle movements, have become omnipresent on American streets, and citizens are outraged by this brutal invasion of their privacy. They feel an almost existential threat from the use of the collected data. Various cases prove them right and encourage violence against those all-seeing eyes.
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Internal Affairs of the Milwaukee Police Department determined that officer Josue Ayala used the information collected through this system to track the location of his romantic partner 124 times and her ex-partner 55 times.
Three members of the Bibb County Sheriff’s team (Georgia) were arrested this week for using these cameras to harass and follow people. The officers used license plate data to track people with whom they had “a personal relationship at that time,” the sheriff’s office reported.
This case is one of the latest known to have raised concerns about the improper use of the results from this widely established license plate reader network in the U.S.
Flock has installed 120,000 devices of this type on light poles and street corners across the country. They photograph passing cars and record each license plate number. They can identify the make and model of a vehicle, as well as its dents and scratches, and even bumper stickers.
All this is incorporated into a huge database to which police departments pay for access. These departments can, and usually do, share their data with other law enforcement agencies, creating a national network.
Flock claims its cameras help track stolen cars, locate criminals, and solve crimes. The company began partnering with police departments less than six years ago and now has contracts with 7,000, representing 40% of the total in the country.
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But this surveillance network has spread so much that it has become an almost invisible reality of everyday existence. The company states it scans 20 billion license plates per month. To put that figure in perspective, and since there are about 300 million registered motor vehicles in the U.S., a car is scanned, on average, about 800 times a year, according to calculations by The New York Times.
By now, the tentacles of Orwellian Big Brother are no longer surprising, but the massive capacity of this project is. Police can consult Flock’s databases to track people in great detail without the need for a court order. Border agents (ICE) use this to pursue immigrants. There is a confirmed case of a Texas agent who used it to follow a woman across state borders on suspicion that she had undergone an abortion.
This has caused these cameras to be the target of great aversion, and acts of violence motivated by the desire to destroy them are not uncommon. The company announced this Thursday that it will implement protective measures in its products to prevent misuse and calm public outrage.
The changes include reducing the default period for retaining data on people’s movements from one month to one week. In cases where an officer wants to keep the information longer, they will be asked to enter a case number.
Additionally, Flock also plans to incorporate a system called Audit Assistance, which will block access for a user whose searches show “anomalous activity,” according to the press release.
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