Wherever anyone has gone in America, Flock knows.
The cameras from Flock, a police technology company that tracks vehicle movements, have become omnipresent on American streets and citizens are crying out for 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 eyes that see everything.
Internal affairs of the Milwaukee Police Department determined that agent Josue Ayala used the information collected through that system to know the location of his romantic partner on 124 occasions and that of her ex-partner on 55 occasions.
Three members of the Bibb County (Georgia) sheriff's team were arrested this week for using these cameras to harass and follow people. The officers used the license plate data to track people with whom they had “a personal relationship at the time,” the sheriff's office reported.
This case is one of the latest known cases that have raised concerns about the improper application of the results of this network of license plate readers, widely established in the United States.
The company Flock has installed 120,000 such devices on lighting poles and on street corners throughout the country. They photograph passing cars and record the number of each license plate. They can identify the make and model of a vehicle, as well as its dents and dings, and even bumper stickers.
All of this feeds into a huge database that police departments pay to access. Those departments can, and typically do, share their data with other law enforcement agencies, creating a national network.
Flock maintains that its cameras help track stolen cars, locate criminals and solve crimes. This firm began partnering with police departments less than six years ago and now has contracts with 7,000, which is 40% of the total in the country.
But this surveillance network has spread so much that it has become an almost invisible reality of everyday existence. The company says it scans 20 billion license plates a month. To put that number in perspective, and since there are about 300 million registered motor vehicles in the US, a car is scanned, on average, about 800 times a year, according to calculations by The New York Times.
At this point the tentacles of Orwellian Big Brother are no longer surprising, but the massive capacity of this project is. Police officers can query Flock databases to track people in great detail without needing a warrant. 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 lines on suspicion that she had undergone an abortion.
This has caused these cameras to be the object of great aversion and there is no shortage of acts of violence caused by the desire to destroy them. The company announced this Thursday that it will implement protective measures in its products to prevent misuse and calm citizen fury.
The changes include reducing the period for which it retains data on people's movements by default, from one month to one week. In cases where an agent wants to retain information longer, they will be asked to enter a case number.
Additionally, Flock also plans to introduce a system called Audit Support, which will block access to a user whose searches show “anomalous activity,” according to the press release.
