WASHINGTON — A vast and growing network of artificial intelligence-driven Flock cameras could violate constitutional privacy rights, U.S. senators on a Judiciary Committee subcommittee said during a Wednesday hearing.
GOP Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri, the chair of the Crime and Counterterrorism Subcommittee, said the point of the hearing was to find out “what is going on with the expanding surveillance network that appears to be going coast to coast in this country.”
Hawley said he invited the CEO of Flock Safety to testify, but he did not appear.
Senators heard from a woman wrongly arrested over a fatal car crash after a Flock camera captured a photo of her vehicle three miles from the crash site.
They speculated that more people could be falsely accused based on inaccurate information gathered by the devices. They also said Fourth Amendment violations were likely because the law enforcement agencies that use the service are able to use the data to track movements without a warrant.
“If you haven’t heard of Flock, all I have to say is Flock’s probably heard of you,” Hawley said. “I’m sure we’re all in the database.”
Flock did not respond to States Newsroom’s request for comment.
What is Flock?
Flock cameras track and record every motor vehicle that comes into view, including its license plate number, make, model, bumper stickers and color. They can also capture images of people.
The information is then uploaded to a database that any law enforcement agency that contracts with the company can access without a warrant.
There are more than 120,000 Flock cameras installed across the country from highways to outside grocery stores, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. The only U.S. state that does not have a Flock camera is Hawaii.
Media outlets such as The Washington Post have documented abuses of the service, including law enforcement officers using the devices to stalk ex-girlfriends.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement has also tapped into Flock data through local law enforcement officials to read license plates for immigration-related searches, even though Flock denies having a contract with ICE.
The backlash to the possibility of mass surveillance has been strong, with NPR reporting vandalization of Flock cameras.
Arizona sheriff brushed off, he says
One of the witnesses at Wednesday’s hearing, Ross Teeple, the sheriff of Pinal County, Arizona, said he ultimately decided to end a contract with Flock because he had raised privacy concerns the company did not adequately address.
Some of his constituents said they were worried that people could be identified in images taken by Flock cameras. He said when he asked the company about how people could be clearly seen in the images, he felt the company brushed aside his concerns and told him the image resolution was not good enough to recognize a person.
“I’m looking at camera pictures where I could recognize the person on the camera, but that was their claim …, and there was just too much disinformation from them and dishonesty,” he said. “I was trying to get answers from them, and they would not give me answers… and there were too many concerns. So we just decided not to continue our contract.”
False accusation
Hawley said his main worries were personal privacy and that people have the right to be treated as innocent until proven guilty.
He pointed to one of the witnesses, Lindsey Isaacs of Florida, who was wrongly accused of being involved in a car accident that killed three people because a Flock automated license plate recognition camera saw her vehicle about three miles west of the crash scene.
The car involved in the crash was a Dodge Durango, the same make and model as Isaacs’. But hers was black, while the car in the crash was maroon, as described by a witness.
Law enforcement still arrested her at her home.
She spent three days in solitary confinement and then moved to another maximum-security unit for 10 days before she was released and state prosecutors dropped charges, she told the panel.
“In my case, a Flock camera captured my vehicle a few miles from the scene of a terrible crash,” she said. “That piece of information became part of an investigation that ultimately led to my arrest on three counts of vehicular homicide and 13 days in jail for a crash I had nothing to do with.”
Hawley said what he finds “so troubling” is that many drivers or people walking by are being surveilled and they’ve done nothing wrong.
“It sounds as if, based on the reports we’ve heard, it’s treating every citizen in America, I mean, by now, surely almost all of us have been scanned and logged as if we are criminals, yet without any due process, without any reasonable suspicion, without any articulable suspicion whatsoever,” he said. “This just seems very, very strange, to put it mildly, and something I think this committee really needs to hear about.”
Abortion tracking
New Jersey Democratic Sen. Cory Booker asked if Flock cameras could be used to track women in states with strict abortion laws.
ACLU’s Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel, said that it would be easy to track people searching for those services.
Hawley agreed with Booker and also questioned how easy it would be to create a database of certain people, such as those who attend gun shows.
“When you have this amount of data available, the temptations to use it are going to be absolutely incredible, if not irresistible,” he said.
Marlow said the scenarios that Booker and Hawley cited are closer than they think.
“If you build it, they will come,” he said. “I so much appreciate that you’re bringing (up) abortion care seekers and gun owners because they are part of the same community when it comes to the threat of mass surveillance. This is something we need to be worried about because when you create the temptation, when you create the option for population control, at some point someone’s going to use it.”
Missouri Independent and States Newsroom originally published this story.
