Flock cameras and the privacy debate

Police departments across Minnesota are increasingly using flock license plate cameras to help solve crimes, but the technology is also raising a lot of privacy concerns. Joining us now to talk about this issue is a senior policy analyst with the ACLU, Jay Stanley. Jay, thanks for joining me. Thanks for having me on. Jay, you're considered an expert on this topic. You've written several articles about flock cameras. For our viewers who aren't familiar with these cameras, can you just break down what they are and what they do? Yeah, so license plate readers are basically AI-enabled cameras that are pointed at traffic on a road or highway, and look at the license plate on each car and use AI to figure out what the numbers is, and then record the fact that your license plate was on this corner at this time and stores that in the database. A lot of the modern ones are using AI to do more than just scan the license plate. They are collecting information about your vehicle overall, bumper stickers you might have, distinguishing characteristics like a gun rack or modifications because you're a disabled person or other things, and so it is a powerful surveillance tool, and there are networks of these cameras all around the country that the company Flock runs all of them, and so all of that data can flow to the company's servers, and in many cases can be searched by police anywhere in America, even a search in your community. So Flock says that all they're storing is the license plate information, but you're saying they're collecting more than that. Do you guys have any data or information that leads you to believe that they are saving information about the car, about the driver beyond just the license plate? Well, their own marketing materials, they talk about what they call vehicle fingerprinting technology, which stores the color of the make and the model of cars in addition to the license plate number, anything like a crumpled bumper, or as I said, things like bumper stickers, and so that is a much more powerful sort of vehicle search tool than just the license plates, but even the license plates is very powerful because it means they can run your car and they could find out a bunch of things about where you've been going and at what time, and that's where a lot of the privacy issues come in. So are the privacy issues about data collection and data storage, or is it more than that? It is about that, yes, it's mainly about that. I mean, records of where people are going in their life are very private. It can show things about how often you go to bars, whether you go to certain doctors, Alzheimer's doctors, what kind of sexually oriented, religiously oriented union activity, political activity, all kinds of things. There have been agencies that have been found putting license plate readers outside of gun shows, for example, ATF was doing that. And so this is something that's provoking concern across the political spectrum. We're seeing a lot of people on both the left, the right and the middle who are objecting to this kind of privacy invasion. And obviously a police officer standing in a corner can see your vehicle, but if the police were following you around 24 seven for a month, you'd be very spooked out by that. Yeah, certainly. You've written that the biggest danger is mission creep. What does that mean? And what are some examples that you've already seen of these systems being used in ways communities never anticipated? Yeah, well, this is a very powerful surveillance tool and what happens when you create systems like this is that it does end up getting used for other things. There've been controversies about people in communities saying, well, my local law enforcement wants to do this and store this data maybe for a limited period of time. That's what, that's okay. And then are surprised to learn that a sheriff in Texas is searching their data and looking for a woman who had an abortion, which is currently illegal in Texas. And that it's being used by ICE for immigration detention. It's being used to investigate protesters. And so that is a lot of the reason why we worry about mission creep. And we're also seeing AI used for it. People are getting stopped and because they are told that their quote unquote patterns of movement are suspicious and flock brags about this in their marketing materials that they can do analyses and flag people who for whatever reason may be driving around in ways that are different from everybody else and bring them to the attention of law enforcement. And then law enforcement will sometimes pull those people over on a pretext. So that's the kind of way that AI is making uses of this technology in ways that a lot of people don't expect when they just say, okay, the police say it's gonna be used to catch bad guys and I'm in favor of that. Of course, everybody's in favor of that, but you have to ask what the side effects are. How much control do these cities have that deploy the flock cameras over the data and where that data goes? So they have a certain amount of control when you, if your city decides that it wants to have a contract with flock, the first decision is does your city share its data nationwide? And what flock can do is they can let your police chief do a search of a license plate, not only in your community, but anywhere in America. But if they want, if your police chief wants that power, then they have to agree to share your community's data with all the other police chiefs everywhere in America. And that's when you see a lot of the ICE usages and stuff. And so, but you can say you don't wanna be part of that and that you don't want flock to make your community's data available everywhere in the country. And you can put a lot of other restrictions. We have on our website, recommended language. We recommend not becoming a customer of flock, but some cities decide to. And if you're going to do that, you can limit the way that it's used. You can limit how long the data is retained. Some things you can't control, the data is still flowing to this for-profit company about everybody in your community and where they're driving and when. But there are a lot of things that you can do to limit how much of that data is shared. You've written about how flock has changed some of its contracts in ways that shift control away from the cities. So what should cities know before they sign a contract? What should they be looking for before they sign a contract or renew a contract with flock? Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, again, are you allowing nationwide data sharing? What kinds of data retention periods are you allowing for? And then look at exactly what they're saying in terms of, does your city own the data? Does your city get to access the data in its original form? And that's where we've seen some of this shifting contract language by the company creating pitfalls for cities. We've had people say, if this helps police catch dangerous criminals, why wouldn't we use it? Why should we be against it? What do you say to those people? Yeah, look, obviously everybody, we're all in favor of catching dangerous criminals, but you have to ask, not just does this ever do anything, and of course the police will tout its successes, but what kind of failures are there? How many innocent people are getting caught up by errors? And there have been people all around the country who have found themselves lying on the pavement with a jittery police officer pointing a gun at them because a FLOC reader or another company's license plate reader misread their license plate or misread what state it was, or the NCIC, which is the FBI criminal database that FLOC references wasn't updated, so a car that was stolen has actually been returned and it was a rental car, you're renting it, and now the police think that you're a dangerous criminal because the system is messed up. And police made errors before we had these kinds of systems, but when you have this company and other companies that are often equally as scary, doing billions of plate reads every day, then you're gonna get more errors, you're gonna get more of this kind of stuff happening, and we're all susceptible to being caught up by an error, we're all susceptible to the police targeting us because we're driving around aimlessly, maybe we're looking at houses or something, and their algorithm decides that we're suspicious. And so, and also, you know, if I'm driving downtown at two in the morning and I'm not doing anything wrong, why are the police keeping tabs on me? Why are they keeping records on when I'm driving and where I am? I think a lot of Americans just find it fundamentally offensive and feel that the government shouldn't be looking over everybody's shoulder just in case you're a criminal, looking over everybody's shoulder all the time. And that's not the way that, you know, we're supposed to live in America. This happened just yesterday. An automotive journalist who's based here in Minnesota wrote about his encounter with a local police department. You know, he gets new cars every couple of weeks. I've interviewed Joel a couple of times in my career, but Joel Fetter, he writes for thedrive.com and several other automobile review sites and news publications, and he was driving, like he always does, a loan vehicle. He gets a new car about every two weeks. And he was driving this loan vehicle and got stopped by police. They put him through the ringer for a couple hours, him and his wife. Turns out it was all a big mistake. They had the license plate wrong. Is this something that, you know, is happening to everyday people normally? And what's your reaction to what happened to Joel? Yeah, I mean, that's terrible. And, you know, it's scary to have law enforcement thinking that you're a really dangerous person when you know you're not. And some of those cases turn out very tragically, as we all know. And so that's a dangerous thing. And, you know, a lot of people say, well, I don't have anything to hide, so why do I care if, you know, if everybody's watching? And, you know, one of the answers is because of errors, because mistakes are made. And when you, the more surveillance you do, the more decisions you're making about, is this person okay? Is this person okay? Then the more this is gonna happen. But, you know, it's also not just about errors. We don't wanna have this kind of surveillance because it creates chilling effects. It makes everybody feel watched all the time. It lends itself to abuses, for example, political purposes. And so, you know, I think that the lesson here is that, you know, when the police tout, oh, this had this great success from the surveillance technology, you have to look beyond that and not just say, okay, that's great, but what are the other side effects of this technology? I mean, what is it doing to our communities? Right. And we did interview Joel and we've got that story up on Fox 9. If anybody wants to see his story, he also published a lengthy article about his encounter with police and this mishap on thedrive.com. What's one question that you think that residents and city council members should be asking themselves before they sign a contract or consider working with Flock? I mean, I think one of the basic questions is, you know, how would you feel after a while, after this has been going on for a while, just sort of knowing that there is logged at the police station, you know, a record of where you're driving and when. And, you know, at first you might not think about it, it might not seem like a big deal, but I think that over time it creates chilling effects. And, you know, maybe you're going to protest the police or you're going to protest something else. And you're just like, or you heard about somebody who was stopped by error or something like the person that you interviewed or stopped because their movements were suspicious. And you start saying to yourself, are the police going to think that this driving that I'm doing is suspicious? Then you start to become self-conscious. And I don't think that that's how we should have to live in this country. Yeah. Where do they place these cameras? That's what I'm having a hard time understanding. Like where are these cameras that they're capturing, constantly capturing photos of my license plate? They're around streets. Sometimes they're high up, but often they're just a little pole. You'll see a pole. It's got a little camera and it has a distinctive little solar panel on it. It's the typical ones that you'll see just sort of by the side of the road. There are some that are hidden. For example, the DEA has license plate readers on a lot of highways, even, you know, you know, all over the country, not just along the Southern border. And they are often hidden in like orange traffic barrels. So it varies, but a lot of the Flock cameras are very identifiable. There's a sort of a pole and there's a little camera with the usual smoke dome. And then there's a solar panel on top of it. Wow. We have two communities here recently who ended their contracts with Flock amid data sharing concerns. With those, and those two communities are right outside Minneapolis, Brooklyn Park and Columbia Heights. Will that complicate them working with nearby departments if they are not part of this network that other departments are a part of? I don't see any reason why it has to be. You know, I think that the smarter and more professional police leaders, they recognize that they serve their community and that they have to reflect the community's desires and values in what kind of, especially advanced surveillance technology that's very controversial, very brand new in the human experience of millions of years of human beings. This is the first time the government's had this kind of power. And so we are seeing around the country a lot of towns and cities that are in many cases, you know, canceling their Flock contracts or their contracts with other vendors like Axon and Motorola. And even more questioning it and having debates about it. So it is something that has really entered the public awareness. People are becoming more and more aware of it. And it's, you know, it's generating controversy, as I said, on left and right for various reasons. Yeah, it's sparked a lot of concern across the country and here in Minnesota as more than a hundred police departments here use it. Jay Stanley with the ACLU. I so appreciate you joining us. Thanks so much for having me on.