Flock That
Flock Safety is one of several automatic license plate reader (ALPR) companies currently operating in the United States. Here's how Flock works, according to Business Insider:
cameras are commonly installed along roads, at intersections, near neighborhood entrances, and around businesses or other private properties.
When a vehicle passes, the camera captures an image and uses machine learning to turn its license plate, color, make, model, and other details into searchable information.
Time out. Let that sink in. Every. Single. Car. That. Passes. Gets. Logged.
Which maybe wouldn't be a huge deal if these cameras weren't terribly prevalent. But Flock has some 129,000 cameras operating across 49 states. Use this handy website to spot the Flock cameras in your neighborhood!
The data collected by Flock's ALPRs is uploaded to a nationwide database that, as the ACLU writes, "any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search — with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find."
In a WaPo story today about law enforcement officers using Flock to stalk exes, the paper writes:
officers don’t need a warrant to run a search; they just type a plate number and go.
Over time, Flock upgraded its tool’s surveillance power, creating “hot lists” that notify officers whenever a target car is captured on camera and a “vehicle fingerprint” feature that lets them search for a vehicle by its look or characteristics — say, any white minivan with bumper stickers — without knowing its plate number, company documents show.
Flock customers include local and federal law enforcement (National Parks, Veterans Affairs hospitals, and military bases) as well as the corporations behind Home Depot and Lowes. [Side note: When it comes to private companies, people can push back. A class action suit was filed against Home Depot in April for its use of Flock cameras. And The American Prospect reports that corporate shareholders are making proposals asking these companies to justify their use of the technology.]
That's dystopian, you might be thinking, but this is the immprof blog. Is there an immigration angle?
Flock would have you think not. There's an entire webpage where Flock says that it does not share data with ICE.
Local police around the country are performing lookups in Flock’s AI-powered automatic license plate reader (ALPR) system for “immigration” related searches and as part of other ICE investigations, giving federal law enforcement side-door access to a tool that it currently does not have a formal contract for.
That's hardly surprising given what we know about the explosion of 287(g) agreements. Andrew Thrasher's phenomenal 287g database and program tracker reports 2,179 active agreements with 1,858 participating agencies as of today.
By the by, curious if you've been the target of flocking? Especially in light of Kevin's post earlier today about the targeting of anti-immigration-enforcement activists? There's a website for that too: https://haveibeenflocked.com.
Welcome to this new frontier in our very own surveillance state.
