Flock's Worst Feature
Few topics are as confusing and divisive as Flock Safety’s growing camera network and the growing concerns about their effectiveness and privacy controls. Are they the greatest crime fighting tool of the last few decades? Or are they just another player in a new trend of bulk data collection and state surveillance? Here at T.REX, we have a strong desire for real criminal justice and the defense of liberty. That is why we’ve been spending a lot of time studying this topic.
At first glance, Flock’s roughly 120,000 installed cameras look insignificant next to the tens of millions of security cameras already watching American homes and businesses through millions of separate, unconnected systems. Nearly half of American households have a video doorbell, and most individuals have cameras in their pockets.
The database that Flock is building is also nothing special; Google and Apple and Meta already have these tracking databases for all of their users, and car companies are now collecting the driving data of all of their customers. Law enforcement departments have always had the ability to use warrants to get data from any of these private security systems, cell phone companies, service providers or automotive databases whenever they have criminal investigations to pursue.
But what Flock is offering is different. It’s a subscription to this same location data, but as a service that can be accessed by anyone, at any time, from anywhere, WITHOUT a warrant. Flock’s whole sales pitch is instantaneous data access without the hassle of getting a warrant or even opening a criminal investigation in the first place. Any search can be run without the limits of a particular jurisdiction or the paper trail of going to a judge.
Clearly, this service has huge privacy implications.
And these implications have been contested in court before. The Supreme Court’s cases Jones, Carpenter and Chatrie have all dealt with this issue of what the Fourth Amendment requires in terms of process. Together, they hold that while being on a public road doesn't give you expectation of privact, detailed tracking of people and their movements over long periods of time DOES violate their Fourth Amendment rights without a warrant.
So how does Flock attempt to get around these obviously applicable legal precedents? Well, all their claims involve a thin grey line; a fuzzy and undefined area somewhere between public and private data. An area rife with confusion that they have carefully engineered themselves into for cover.
Flock claims that it can bypass the restrictions of the Fourth Amendment on collecting private and detailed movements over long periods of time because it is a totally private institution. However, at the same time, Flock is allowed to place its cameras on public roadways, and sometimes utilize public infrastructure, because its clients are largely public institutions and civil governments.
Anytime Flock encounters a restriction on private companies, they try to bypass it by pointing out that they serve public customers with public funds. If they encounter a restriction on public entities, they can sidestep that by being a private company. This grey area is a remarkably convenient space for them.
And Flock is equally evasive when it comes to the technical capabilities of their cameras and their database. They and their advocates have continually and consistently called their cameras Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), implying that all they do is capture license plate data from passing cars.
But their sales pitch to law enforcement is that they also track vehicles based on make, model, color, and even bumper stickers. Furthermore, Flock cameras are often mounted near parks, in buildings, and other places with no vehicle traffic, and security researchers investigating these devices have found them recording video of pedestrians, including children in parks. Newer Flock hardware also picks up the RF signals of phones and other wireless devices that pass by, and the company has marketed microphones that listen for human voices. It’s a huge amount of information, enough to enable facial recognition, gait analysis, lip reading, and more.
And their central database allows huge searches, not just across these huge swaths of information, but across huge numbers of people as well.
Pflugerville, a small town in Texas, installed Flock cameras and over the course of six months the Pflugerville police ran around 5,000 searches. However, they were shocked to learn that in that same time period, 459 other law enforcement agencies ran more than 1.6 million searches into their population – agencies that Pflugerville never authorized to have access to the data.
On the one hand, Flock sells small counties and communities an affordable way to get rural plate searches, but at the same time its national network has given federal agencies the ability to run massive queries across the entire country. Flock’s PR teams will pick out success stories where Flock cameras were used to find missing persons in a very precise and limited way, but the Flock sales teams will pitch sweeping group search capability to potential law enforcement customers.
The power to create a search profile for all cars with specific bumper stickers, or all cars from specific church parking lots, or all people visiting firearm stores, and then set automated alerts on these groups and maintain continuous observation over them clearly violates the spirit of the law… but Flock argues that they have collected the data in a way that falls within the letter of the law, inside that thin grey line between legal precedents.
The Fourth Amendment clearly requires warrants to be issued for investigations of particular people and areas in direct opposition to bulk searches and dragnets, and our founders warned us against trading liberty for temporary security.
However, advocates for the service (and others like it) claim that these powerful search tools will allow police departments to solve crimes faster and catch criminals more easily. Opponents point out that Atlanta has had a large Flock installation for many years with no evidence that crimes are being solved more effectively… and all too many cases of the system being misused by officers.
At this point, there are countless stories of those with access to the Flock system using it for personal or even criminal purposes, but what might be more chilling are the examples of the system misleading departments into targeting innocent citizens.
In Florida last year, eyewitnesses to a fatal hit-and-run identified a Dodge Durango. Flock found a Durango on camera three miles from the crash, and troopers trusted the computer’s recommendation enough to impound it, even though it had no damage, containted no evidence, and its plate didn’t match what the eyewitnesses remembered. After six months, the owner of the vehicle, Lindsey Isaacs, sued to have it returned, and was arrested and held without bond for almost two weeks. Fortunately for her, the cops arrested a new suspect, and Isaacs is now suing the two Florida Highway Patrol sergeants who arrested her for false arrest and malicious prosecution.
Chrisanna Elser was issued a court summons by a police officer who assured her that they had an airtight case of her stealing a package from a nearby porch. “We have cameras everywhere in that town,” he bragged, “You can’t get a breath of fresh air without us knowing.” She spent two weeks collecting her own cell phone data and other camera footage to prove her actual whereabouts before the authorities admitted the Flock evidence didn't support the accusation and dropped the charges.
An internal audit by the LAPD showed that nearly a third of the stolen vehicle alerts they got from Flock cameras were false positives, causing dangerous and illegal traffic stops. There are plenty of examples of officers becoming too dependent on these flawed computer systems, and making terrible calls as a result.
If this trend continues, we won’t just see isolated mistakes and individual officers getting lazy, but entire departments shifting their procedures and even case selection to utilize the tools that let them skip warrant processes and lean on automated alerts.
We could go on and on about the procedural concerns and poor security practices of Flock’s software and hardware implementations, but the real underlying threat here, and Flock’s worst feature, is a new grey area of jurisdictional fuzziness.
Not only is Flock Safety creating a murky area between public and private services to avoid accountability, but they also create strange jurisdictional confusions. Can county resources be used to install cameras that will primarily see Federal use? Should the Department of Justice have instant access to State criminal investigations and evidence? Did the Florida Highway Patrol accuse Lindsey Isaacs of vehicular homicide, or did the database? Can departments use our tax dollars to support a system that treats every citizen as a potential criminal and every bit of data as potential evidence?
The United States was founded on the presumption of innocence for our citizenry. A criminal investigation and the due process of law is required before the State can prove them guilty. But bulk surveillance tools flip that assumption completely backwards, and the burden of proof falls on us.
The United States was also founded on the presumption of limited government. The agents of the state have strict jurisdictional fences preventing them from encroaching on the unalienable rights of the citizens. But the lack of accountability inside a gigantic subscription service like Flock’s destroys those boundaries as well, blurring the lines between the powers our founders worked so hard to separate.
Fortunately, the really horrific stories of Flock Safety’s mistakes and the misuses of their services have now drawn enough attention that more than 200 cities have terminated their contracts as of this year. The LAPD allowed their contract to expire, and Governor DeSantis has ordered Flock cameras removed from Florida’s state highway system.
Unfortunately, Flock still contracts with more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, and Flock is hardly the only company building similar dragnet services and bulk data collection tools specifically for government agencies. As the public continues to push back against bad algorithms, sloppy data management, and poor security processes, don’t lose sight of Flock’s worst feature, and the biggest threat from all the warrantless data collectors: the erosion of jurisdictional limits.
This will need to be an ongoing effort to restrict unlawful tools from threatening both private citizens and the important jurisdictional boundaries that civil institutions require to operate properly.
The solution isn’t hard, and it doesn’t depend on which company wins the next contract. Any search of a person’s movements should require a warrant, signed by a judge, tied to a specific investigation, with a paper trail the public can see. That was the rule before Flock, and it should be the rule for every vendor after Flock. The friction in that process is not a flaw in our justice system. It is a feature our founders built on purpose, and it’s our job to defend it, not to let a subscription service innovate it away.
For more information about specifics, check out our video series that details different aspects of Flock Safety’s business model, underlying technology, and how these overpowered but imprecise tools actually damage a law enforcement officer’s ability to do real justice.