Flock cameras are getting mobbed

(CNN) — Over the last few months, people have cut down surveillance cameras owned by the company Flock Safety with an electric saw in upstate New York, thrown paint on them in Oakland, California, and rammed a truck into them in Idaho. One man in Florida sits in a lawn chair holding up a piece of cardboard on a pole to block the camera’s view. City governments have joined in by deactivating the cameras or canceling contracts with Flock in Fort Collins, Colorado; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Knoxville, Tennessee; Syracuse, New York; and Walla Walla, Washington.

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Flock sells its services as a crime-fighting tool, built on a network of cameras that record and analyze everything that passes by them. Law enforcement agencies that have contracts with Flock use its troves of observed license plate numbers and other vehicle data to track or reconstruct the movements of vehicles in criminal investigations.

Flock says it has 120,000 automated license plate reader (ALPR) and pan, tilt, and zoom (PTZ) cameras deployed throughout the US, capturing tens of billions of data points a month. Flock’s ALPRs automatically scan every license plate that passes them, while the PTZs record live footage that can be reviewed and analyzed. Because Flock cameras are all connected, the result is a nationwide latticework of recorded activity. Across the majority of states, a police officer in one state can be alerted if a car they’re looking for pops up in another and can inform the local authorities

In recent weeks and months, though, another kind of network has taken shape: a coast-to-coast pattern of opposition to the company. The objectors range from public officials to individual vigilantes, spanning metropolitan and rural America alike. In a politically divided country, opposition to Flock cameras is the rare issue that binds people across the ideological spectrum.

“It’s a violation of people’s privacy,” said Caleb Williams, a 24-year-old in rural South Carolina who identified as a political independent.

“Rational people know it comes down to violating personal liberties,” said Adrien Kaiser, a self-described constitutional conservative who lives northwest of Houston.

“I firmly believe the government can do things to make life better for people, but a surveillance state is the first step towards a police state,” said Jon Dendy, a progressive in Massachusetts.

“Oftentimes our critics will say we need to make a choice between safety or privacy. And I think that’s I think that’s wrong,” Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a recent interview with CNN’s Eric Levenson. “As a country, as a society, as a species, we have proven over and over and over again that we can have safety and privacy.”

Over the last few months, Flock has been making headlines for all the wrong reasons. Police have been caught using the system to stalk exes and colleagues, and journalists have reported that, contrary to the company’s claims that it only logs vehicles, the cameras can be used to track people.

These revelations have been met by a growing guerilla mindset among average citizens. Dozens of Flock cameras have been forcibly disabled in recent weeks, with many people cheering on the vigilantes. In June, a West Virginia man accused of destroying several Flock cameras was arrested. Under a Facebook post from the local NBC affiliate announcing his arrest are dozens of people volunteering to provide alibis. “He was out fishing with me that day, you got the wrong guy,” one man wrote.

“The one thing that’s bringing all of us together, which is exactly what they don’t want,” one woman wrote on Facebook. “The two biggest signs that we can indeed get along are 1) the world cup & 2) our collective middle finger to flock cameras,” added someone else.

In Houston, near where Kaiser lives, there are nearly 4,000 Flock cameras, making it one of the company’s most comprehensive deployments. He said that he supports law enforcement but that it shouldn’t come at the expense of people’s rights and privacy. “Individual rights have always been big on the left and conservatives see things in terms of constitutional rights. So that’s where there’s coming together,” Kaiser said. “We see the same problem from two different angles.”

Like Kaiser, Dendy thinks that Americans on either side of politics are coming to the same conclusion from different routes. “Conservatives are concerned with big government,” he said. “And for progressives it’s the idea of abuse by the government.”

Williams added that he has seen several stories of Flock’s data being misused by police officers who have commandeered the cameras to track ex-partners. “Even if Flock helps solve a crime, it seems like they’re not worth keeping, given the uproar that citizens have shown against it around the country,” he said.

Though Flock has denied that the cameras are also used to track people on foot, and says it does not use facial recognition technology, there is also evidence that the data can be used to search for individuals. 404 Media reported that a Flock capability called “FreeForm” allows users to search camera records based on what someone was wearing, their tattoos or even their race.

The site also reported that, despite Flock’s not sharing data with agencies like ICE, police officers have been performing searches to aid in immigration sweeps. Flock said in a statement to 404 Media that FreeForm includes “guardrails” that alert system administrators when someone uses search terms that include “race, ethnicity, religion, nationality.”

Populist commentators who have recognized the growing animosity toward Flock are joining in the discourse as well. “Every single American is being surveilled at every single moment of the day,” the leftist YouTuber Hasan Piker said on a livestream last year. Earlier this month, the conservative pundit Tucker Carlson got in on the act and devoted an entire episode of his podcast to discussing how companies like Flock are creating an always-on surveillance state for American citizens. “If you were to give up all privacy, you would in exchange get what? Safety. Of course. And that’s the trade always. The problem is it hasn’t worked that way because safety has never been a priority of this ruling class,” Carlson said.

Both Carlson and Piker have recognized that people increasingly see the establishment — including politicians, police forces and the tech sector — as interested in curtailing people’s freedom. “It’s not drug-addicted kids knocking down Flock cameras for fun,” Carlson said. “It’s sober decent patriotic Americans who believe the promises of their country.”

“I think there is an effective way to share your opinion,” Langley said. “You vote, you debate. But I would say I’m not particularly fond of vandalism of anything, whether it’s Flock’s property or the government’s property or just a random individual.”

The 21st century has already seen — literally — a long-running expansion of surveillance. Cameras are ubiquitous on American streets and in other public spaces; internet traffic leaves a trail of everything anyone has looked at on their devices; mobile advertising data companies have created startlingly precise maps of where everyone goes with their personal phones. What’s so different about Flock?

Some of it has to do with something else Americans have a universal affinity for: their cars. “There’s the idea of the open road, the freedom to drive,” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a nonprofit digital rights group. “A lot of people treat their cars like an extension of their homes.” The idea that a company constantly tracks what a car does, whether it was involved in a crime or not, manages to violate people’s expectations of privacy in their personal space and of freedom of movement simultaneously.

But Maass also said Americans are more aware now of exactly how these cameras operate than they used to be. In the past, people understood cameras mounted outside of a store or on a street corner as simple contraptions: a video gets recorded, is retained for a given period of time based on local jurisdiction policies, and then gets deleted. Flock’s default setting is to retain data from its cameras for 30 days, though local police departments can shorten or extend that time based on state and local rules. But the system’s nationwide searchabilty also makes it different from previous generations of surveillance systems. “Once people start learning about the massive scale of the data that’s being collected and who it’s being accessed by, it starts to freak them out,” Maass said.

The news that Flock cameras have been abused by some police officers has only added to people’s dislike and distrust. According to a report by 404 Media, there have been more than a dozen cases of police officers accused of or arrested for using Flock to harass and stalk people, including ex-partners. Langley said that his company has recently rolled out a robust automatic audit process by which suspicious or questionable activity is flagged for administrators.

The cameras are also not foolproof in their authorized uses. On June 28, Joel Feder, a journalist and car reviewer at The Drive, said he was in Plymouth, Minnesota, behind the wheel of a Range Rover he was test-driving, when the vehicle was suddenly swarmed by four police cars. The officers told him the plates had been reported stolen.

“The car was owned by Land Rover North America, it was impossible for it to be stolen,” Feder said.

After a protracted conversation, Feder said he found out that a license plate with a similar number had been reported missing in Los Angeles several weeks prior. An incomplete version of the number was apparently entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC), a national database maintained by the FBI that Flock pulls data from.

Flock’s technology seemed to overlook the mix of large and small numbers on the Land Rover’s New Jersey dealer tags. “The Flock camera saw my entire plate, but it still flagged it as a match,” said Feder, who reviewed the photos the Flock camera had taken of his vehicle during his conversation with law enforcement.

On The Drive’s podcast, Langley told Feder the incident was an “edge case” and said the biggest problem in it was the “archaic” federal database. In Feder’s own writing about the encounter, he said that officers told him that he should keep the car parked at home for the time being, as he could be flagged again if another Flock camera picked him up in another town.

Maass is quick to note that for all of the anti-Flock activism, it is not the only security company deploying connected security cameras. Vigilant Solutions and Motorola also operate ALPR cameras, and there are signs that Axon, a major provider of body cameras to police departments, is starting to take over public contracts from cities that have worked with Flock in the past.

But people are taking notice. Last week, when Syracuse’s local ABC affiliate reported that the city would be ending its partnership with Flock and signing a new agreement with Axon, the response was unsparing. As one commenter on Facebook wrote, “People, we need to reign in these big brother authoritarian goons, not let them just change the camera brand.”