Good morning. Today we’re going to tell you about the little black cameras that are causing a national uproar.
I, spiedEver notice one of these cameras in your neighborhood? If you drive a car, one of them has almost certainly noticed you. Odds are you’ve been clocked hundreds, maybe thousands, of times. A company called Flock has deployed 120,000 such devices atop lampposts and on street corners all around the United States. (See them on a map.) They photograph passing cars, recording every license plate number. They can identify a car’s make and model, as well as its dents and dings and even its bumper stickers. (Your car climbed Mount Washington? Flock knows.) It all goes into an enormous database, which a police department pays for access to. Departments can, and usually do, share their data with other departments, creating a national network. The pitch is simple: Flock says its cameras help track stolen cars, find criminals and solve crimes. The company started teaming up with police departments less than six years ago and now has contracts with 7,000 of them, or 40 percent of the national total. Flock’s surveillance dragnet is so huge and diffuse that it has become an almost-invisible fact of life. The company says it scans 20 billion license plates a month. To put that number into perspective: With about 300 million registered motor vehicles in the United States, according to the Federal Highway Administration, a vehicle, on average, is scanned about 800 times a year. Not so fast
Police officers can query Flock’s databases to track people in intimate detail without a warrant. Some have used them to stalk romantic partners. ICE agents have used them to hunt immigrants. One Texas officer used them to track a woman across state lines who was suspected of having an abortion. We’re accustomed to surveillance cameras, of course; we put them on our doorbells and tolerate them in offices and restaurants. But Flock’s cameras have become objects of intense antipathy, even violence, my colleagues Fernando Alfonso III and Kashmir Hill report. People are cutting them down, splattering them with paint, covering them with trash bags and shooting them with guns. A Tennessee congressional candidate, charged with felony vandalism on an accusation of shooting four Flock cameras, has received more than $13,000 in GoFundMe donations for his legal defense. Privacy advocates are creating apps and websites meant to undermine Flock. One, FlockHopper, plots driving routes that avoid the cameras. Another, Have I Been Flocked?, lets people search police departments’ Flock search logs, obtained through public-record requests. DeFlock invites users to “discover and report automatic license plate readers” in their communities. YouTube videos with millions of views show how Flock’s security vulnerabilities allowed it to be hacked and then watched like a sort of “Netflix for stalkers.” It’s not exactly shocking that many Americans are upset to learn they’re being watched. Flock embodies a bigger, more abstract notion of mass surveillance. Its name is uttered in the same breath as that of Palantir, the data-analysis firm known for, among other things, helping ICE collate data on immigrants. The difference is you can see — and shoot at — a Flock camera. “It feels bad to always be watched and scrutinized,” said DeFlock’s creator, a software engineer in Boulder, Colo., named Will Freeman. The city says its 31 Flock cameras have reduced motor vehicle theft by 34.5 percent.
But where the technology is proliferating, the backlash — much like the backlash against data centers — has been fierce, and often bipartisan. In Texas, Flock’s contracts have been canceled in liberal Austin as well as in Bandera, a conservative town of about 900 people. Last month, a Republican congressman introduced a bill that would require federal agents to obtain a warrant before obtaining Flock’s data. Fernando and Kashmir interviewed the company’s chief executive and got hands-on to see how the system worked. Read their full story here.
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