Flock cameras are becoming synonymous with the idea of government surveillance. Activists have started swarming city council meetings, protesting the cameras and how their data is shared.
Read the full transcript below:
Sam Dingman: This is WAMC's Northeast Notebook. I'm Sam Dingman. All over the country, including here in the Northeast, cities and counties are re-evaluating their relationship with automated license plate readers. One camera company in particular, Flock Safety, has been placed under the national microscope.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: They can capture and increasingly are capturing much more about people in the cars, about characteristics of the car.
Sam Dingman: This technology has existed for years, but it's only recently that activists have started swarming city council meetings, protesting the cameras and how their data is shared.
NAT SOUND (COMMUNITY MEETING)
If the audience is not quiet, we will have to remove you.
Sam Dingman: So why is the pushback happening now, and will it change anything? To learn more about the pushback against flock cameras in New York's Capital Region, I sat down with fellow WAMC reporters Grant Ashley and Sajina Shrestha. The conversation began the way conversations between reporters often do: some shared cultural references.
Grant Ashley: Let's go, girls! Glad you got the reference.
Sam Dingman: Did I quote the right song? Followed by a discussion of our shared affinity for combing through municipal purchase records.
Grant Ashley: You know, it got approved by like some purchase board thing. You know, it's a public meeting, but like, who's going to their like city's procurement board meeting? Right.
Sam Dingman: Before yes, but never went during the comments. Not regular people. Exactly. It never went to the...
Sam Dingman: Grant was talking about the city of Albany's purchase of Flock cameras back in 2024. These cameras are becoming synonymous with the idea of government surveillance. Flock cameras are a form of technology that's often referred to as ALPRs, automated license plate readers.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: When people use that term, what they're talking about are cameras essentially that are capturing information about cars passing by on the road.
Sam Dingman: That's Rachel Levinson-Waldman, director of the Liberty and National Security Program at the Brennan Center for Justice.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: That's sort of their basic functionality, but in fact they can capture and increasingly are capturing much more about people in the cars about characteristics of the car.
Sam Dingman: Flock cameras, which are made by a company called Flock Safety, are the most used ALPRs nationwide. But Flock doesn't just make cameras; it also makes the software that those cameras connect to.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: One of their selling points is that those cameras, basically, they are interconnected with each other.
Sam Dingman: Flock cameras can also identify distinguishing features on the car, like say the fact that it's red or has a roof rack.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: That would then facilitate an officer being able to search the system not just by the license plate, but for instance, you know, find me all of the red cars with roof racks that were passing on this road at a particular time, or even I want to find you know a guy wearing a blue polo shirt who is walking down the street, and if a Flock camera captured that, then that would come up as well.
Sam Dingman: While Rachel was explaining all this, I had this thought: maybe you're having it too. The thought was, and not to be glib, what's the big deal? Security cameras are not a new thing. Maybe they didn't used to be able to distinguish things like roof racks and blue polo shirts, but still, a lot of what these cameras are doing sounds like the kind of thing you might expect law enforcement to be doing as part of the normal work of solving crimes. But the other thing that's different about Flock cameras, Rachel told me, is they don't just capture all this potentially identifying information about cars and people on the street; they store it sometimes indefinitely. And people with access to the associated Flock software can manipulate the data that they have about your car and you in very specific ways.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: As it becomes more of a granular, comprehensive picture of your life, where you're going, what you're doing, whom you're associating with, you know, maybe what kinds of healthcare you're accessing, what your political or religious beliefs are, that actually does start to implicate the Fourth Amendment, and I think it just starts to implicate people's sense of if I'm not doing something wrong, why is all of this information not only being collected but kept for a stretch of time, so that police can go back and look at it and can typically look at it without a warrant?
Sam Dingman: And this is why Grant and Sajina and I sat down in the studio. Sajina started covering public resistance to Flock cameras in Troy, New York, this past spring. Troy had been using Flock cameras for a while, but now there was a growing protest movement against the city's contract with the company.
Sajina Shrestha: I think the reason it got all heated up this time is news about Flock working with ICE was coming out. News about. You know, Flock's alleged misuse was coming out.
Sam Dingman: This idea that Flock is sharing information with ICE - it's something Flock Safety disputes. They actually have a whole section on their website about it, which says, "Quote: Flock does not work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. ICE does not have direct access to Flock cameras, systems, or data, but in a report from the news website 404 Media last year, a FOIA request revealed thousands of cases where the federal government asked for and received Flock data from local law enforcement to help ICE pursue immigration enforcement activities. There have also been dozens of reports nationwide of law enforcement officers using Flock systems to access information about people in their personal lives, including a case in the Albany Sheriff's Office.
Grant Ashley: They found out that you know this investigator had searched for her ex-girlfriend's vehicle about 3,000 times over the course of a year, year and a half.
Sam Dingman: Three thousand...
Grant Ashley: Three thousand, yeah. And then she'd also searched for different acquaintance. I think four other acquaintances, a total of 1,000 times combined. So that was like 4,000 unauthorized Flock camera searches.
Sam Dingman: In New Bedford, Massachusetts. Two officers were also recently found to be using Flock to track their exes, and there was a similar incident over the summer in Stowe, Massachusetts. These cases have motivated some communities to discontinue their use of the controversial cameras. Earlier this year, the Syracuse Common Council voted to end the city's contract with Flock Safety, but as Jason Smith, the news director of Central New York Public Radio station WRVO, told me, that didn't mean Syracuse was ending its use of ALPRs.
Jason Smith: In fact, the same day that the city council voted to cancel its contract with Flock, they voted to sign a new contract with Axon Enterprises.
Sam Dingman: The Arizona-based Axon Enterprises was, until recently, perhaps best known as the maker of the Taser, but now they're one of Flock Safety's competitors in the ALPR business, and at that meeting, the Syracuse Common Council did their best to convince the many anti-surveillance activists in attendance that Axon's tech is harder to misuse and would therefore address the community's concerns about potential abuse of ALPR data. But the community wasn't buying it.
Jason Smith: Several advocates got very angry, very upset.
NAT SOUND (COMMUNITY MEETING): If they don't be quiet, they're going to have to be removed from the chamber. Okay, motion. If this, if the audience is not quiet, we will have to remove you. Okay, so ...
Jason Smith: They ended up stopping the meeting, calling police in to bring these people out.
Sam Dingman: There's also a general worry about the cameras' use of artificial intelligence. AI technology is integrated into Flock safety services, both the cameras themselves and the algorithms Flock uses to sort the data the cameras collect.
Grant Ashley: You know, people are like concerned about whether that's going to take their jobs or you know have you know these really negative effects on society, and then this is kind of like the, you know, one of the physical manifestations of it, right? You can see these cameras when you're driving around. So I think, yeah, it's the ICE stuff absolutely, but also AI concerns too.
Sajina Shrestha: And I feel like touching on the ICE stuff, I definitely think something that happened nationally that tipped it over was definitely, you know, the killing of Renee Good, because I do believe that it was after that killing that people were, they were always scared of ICE. There was always a lot of fear, but it was like they've shot someone, and that there's that fear of, well, you know, if I protest ICE, will my car be tracked after? What does that mean for me? And that sort of fear around can I protest peacefully? Can I protest freely?
Sam Dingman: I also asked the Brennan Center's Rachel Levinson-Waldman about this.
Rachel Levinson-Waldman: I think there are moments when things sort of coincide. You know, I think it's often difficult, sort of, to to get attention to privacy issues. They often do seem a little remote, and there often is a sense of, yeah, I'm not doing anything wrong. I don't have anything to hide, and so sometimes there are opportunities to do a little more education about why privacy matters to everyone, why it's really fundamental to democracy and to people's ability to sort of live their day-to-day lives in in safety and in peace.
Sam Dingman: Northeast Notebook is a production of WAMC Northeast Public Radio. It was produced by our executive producer Lucas Willard. Our editor is Diane DeVore. Music by Eduardo Rivera.
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I'm your host, Sam Dingman. Thanks for listening.
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