The Controversy Over Flock Cameras

The Cato Weekly Podcast

The episode examines the rapid expansion of Flock Safety's automatic license plate reader network across the U.S., highlighting concerns over mass surveillance and privacy erosion. Host Laura Bondank-Harmon and Cato Institute

Key takeaways

• Flock Safety operates over 120,000 automatic license plate readers across 49 states, conducting roughly 20 billion scans monthly while storing data in private databases accessible by multiple law enforcement agencies.
• Former police officers and deputies have been caught misusing the technology to stalk ex-partners or investigate personal matters, demonstrating systemic vulnerabilities despite recent policy caps on data retention.

Main topics

• Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs)
• Flock Safety surveillance network

Notable quotes

Enabling the government to have total insight into everything that citizens do... is a deeply sinister and easily abused form of power that is utterly inconsistent with living in a free society.

Conclusion

The episode underscores the urgent need for legislative and judicial guardrails to prevent unchecked

Transcript preview

Speaker 8 (0:04) How much privacy and freedom are we willing to give up in the name of security? That question is increasingly relevant, thanks to a technology you may not even realize is watching you. Flock cameras are Speaker 5 (0:17) helping police crack cases, but they're also raising a serious question about privacy. How much of your everyday life should the government be able to watch? They're supposed to help police and law enforcement fight crime, but critics worry about privacy and misuse, including by the police themselves. Three former sheriff's deputies in Georgia used the Flock cameras to stalk people. And it's this type of concern that has become so intense that now more than 20 cities are moving to cancel Flock camera contracts. Speaker 8 (0:50) Flock operates over 120,000 automatic license plate readers throughout the country. These cameras photograph your car, record where and when it was seen, and allow law enforcement and other clients to search that data later. This technology is being used to identify stolen cars and crime suspects, but it also means that the government can access that data and track your trip to the grocery store, doctor's office, movie theater, or any place else you might want to go, all without a warrant or probable cause. Speaker 5 (1:19) Flock Safety is making changes to its cameras as cities across American Express concerns on privacy and surveillance. Dozens of drivers nationwide say they're being unfairly pulled over, some even at gunpoint. Keep your hands above your head. Due to alleged misuse of flock safety's license plate readers. I don't want to be in a situation where these tech companies, a handful of tech companies, know everything about you and know where you're going. And I know they collect a lot as it is, but I think it's going to get a lot worse. Speaker 8 (1:49) So isn't this a problem for liberty? I'm Laura Bonding-Carmon. Speaker 8 (1:55) And this is the Cato Weekly Podcast. Speaker 8 (2:00) Today, I'm joined by Clark Neely, Senior Vice President for Legal Studies at the Cato Institute, expert in constitutional law, over-criminalization, and police accountability. Hi, Clark. Thanks so much for being here today. I'm excited to be here, Laura. So, can you tell us, what are these devices? What is an automatic license plate reader? This Speaker 7 (2:20) is a relatively new kind of technology that... It basically entails putting Speaker 2 (2:25) a camera in a public place where it can observe, currently, mostly traffic, just people driving their cars around. And these cameras can record various data about the cars, including license plates, but increasingly also potentially... other identifying characteristics, like a particular bumper sticker. These images are stored and searchable. And so in theory, the government Speaker 7 (2:50) now has this database so that if, for example, a crime occurs and they're trying to figure out what vehicles were leaving the scene of that crime during a certain window of time, they would be able to go to this Speaker 2 (3:00) database and identify those vehicles. That's the theory anyway. And sometimes it actually does work that way. But of course, there's Speaker 8 (3:05) a Speaker 2 (3:05) lot of other baggage that comes with it. Speaker 3 (3:07) How is the information captured by ALPR stored? You mentioned this database. Is this database, you know, centralized to the department that manages the cameras? Speaker 7 (3:17) Well, as we both know, Laura, you know at least about as much about this subject as I do. So this is going to be, I think, more of a conversation than an interview. Speaker 7 (3:26) Part of the problem is we don't know exactly for sure who's got the relevant information at any time. What we do know is that there is a private database that's maintained by the companies that offer this technology to law enforcement. So that would be Flock, which has the majority share of the market right now, but also Motorola. Axon. Axon, right. Speaker 2 (3:47) So I believe with respect to all three of those companies, the main form of storage for the information is in a company database. But then the real question or an important question is, well, who exactly has access to Speaker 7 (4:00) that database? And if you think it's just the law enforcement agency that is operating the particular cameras in question, we've got a rude surprise for you. Speaker 5 (4:07) I publicly demonstrated that by pushing the button on the camera three times, I was able to access all of the data or reprogram the device however I wanted in under a minute. Both Axon and Motorola are actively rolling out the same reckless features that we're shaming clock for, and you can expect these same vulnerabilities will continue to happen over and over again when innocent people's data is traded between private companies and police without any safeguard or protection. Speaker 3 (4:30) Well, I think that's one very interesting aspect of the conversation around what most people call flock cameras. So we say flock cameras. We're talking about these automatic license plate readers. Flock Speaker 7 (4:41) has become sort of the generic term like Kleenex. What we're talking about is a camera that's out there in public recording images, right now mostly of vehicles, but that could change. So we say flock camera. You think a whole bunch of cameras out there in public watching people persistently wherever they go. Speaker 3 (4:56) Yeah. And I think one interesting thing about flock cameras is that we've always had cameras in public for a very, very long time. You know, if you walk past any public building, you know that you're on camera. You know that there's CCTV outside of the public courthouse. But these are different. Can you explain why these are different? Speaker 7 (5:16) Well, of course, the biggest difference is that they are operated by the government. under a contract with one of these companies. So it's not the same thing as a company that puts a camera outside its business, you know, to capture images of, you know, maybe somebody breaking in after hours or even increasingly common use of cameras on people's front doors, like a ring camera, right? Those are all... private individuals making private decisions to, you know, put these cameras in particular places. And as you say, we all sort of have an understanding that as we, you know, maybe walk through a neighborhood or walk down a, you know, a block with a bunch of retail businesses, there's some chance that we'll be captured on somebody's camera. But up until this point, at least, there wasn't, there's not really been any ability to sort of throw all those images together and all that information together into a giant database, which then becomes searchable. And suddenly now, you know, it's not just that maybe a few houses saw you walk by on your, you know, your morning walk, but there's a pretty decent chance that somebody could reconstruct, you know, your entire day, all the places that you went. Now, change one important thing and have that be, you know, the government, Speaker 2 (6:27) right? And as we alluded to earlier, it's not just. the police department in whatever city or town you happen to live in, there's a lot of information sharing that happens among law enforcement agencies. And so you've got the, let's call it the law enforcement community Speaker 7 (6:42) has decided to install these cameras, save these images and other Speaker 2 (6:47) data and search them, generally speaking, whenever they want on their own prerogative. to share them among each other. That I think is a much more concerning, I might even use the word sinister, environment than one in which a whole bunch of private businesses and people happen to have Speaker 7 (7:02) cameras that capture some people for some part of their day and usually not much of a day and don't have the ability to really pool that data. And search it. And also don't really have the incentive. Like, why would you do that if you had a ring camera, right? Information storage is expensive. Searching that information is expensive, or at least it has a cost. And nobody would have any particular motive to do that. But guess who does have a motive to save the information and err on the side of searching it whenever they're in doubt? Law enforcement. I Speaker 3 (7:31) think another really scary thing about these systems is that it's... The databases are retroactive, right? So it's not like the police are just searching a small window of time. Different agencies have different retention periods, and they can go back in time and track you in the past in addition to tracking you in the future. There's really no limit on how many of your movements that they can map out and how long they can follow you. Speaker 2 (7:59) Yeah, you know... We parents, those of us who have children, understand that one of the things you have to talk to your kids about is that in this era, they have to understand that kind of anything they might do in public might live forever, right? You make an off-color joke at a party or you embarrass yourself in some way. If somebody happens to be recording that and it goes on the internet, it's there forever, potentially, right? And that's really what you're talking about here, I think, is these images of people going about their business are there forever. So, you know, and it could be there's, of course, the rejoinder is always, well, if you're not doing anything wrong, why would you care? Well, you know, first of all, define not doing anything wrong. What's considered to be wrong can change over time. But also, maybe it's not particularly relevant for anybody to know what doctor you went to yesterday right now, right? But I don't know, maybe you get nominated to be on the Supreme Court or you run for office and suddenly people are very interested in what church you go to or how many times you went to see a doctor or maybe you went to see a mental health provider, right? That information wasn't particularly relevant to anybody at the time that it happened. But now, a few years later, it's real relevant. And who knows how long that information sticks around in one of these databases. And of course, law enforcement has these kind of strong and sometimes perverse incentives to... Keep that information indefinitely.