woman wearing white tank top driving vehicle during daytime
In a respite from election commentary, while we were visiting Wellfleet, Mass., last week, a town meeting voted unanimously to ban automatic license plate reader (ALPR) systems such as Flock camera systems.
An hour later, the town Selectboard made the policy local law, and added a ban on tracking boats in town waters for good measure. Wellfleet, population 3,556, became the first jurisdiction on Cape Cod to bar license plate readers and one of about 40 cities in the state to do so. Local police agreed with activists, including our sister-in-law, an organizer, that the readers were unnecessary in the town and abridged individual rights to move about freely without surveillance by corporations like Flock with national databases, at least not without a warrant or court order.
The specific impetus for a growing national campaign is the continuing perception that the automatic tracking of license plates is being abused by border patrol and ICE agents to locate migrants for Donald Trump’s mass deportation campaign, which clearly has gone way beyond seeking undocumented residents with backgrounds of serious crime or violence.
Flock Safety, one of the main vendors of these cameras, makes pitches about public safety to local officials who sign up thinking mostly about traffic uses and without understanding that Flock, Axon, and Motorola operate data networks that agencies all over the country can search.
While the corporations say that cities can decide how broadly to share that data, many local officials have been learning that they have been sharing it with federal agencies, including the immigration police.
Fortune Magazine reports border patrol agents reportedly tapped into tens of thousands of Flock camera lookups and network data points over the past year, often operating without local police departments being actively notified or kept in the loop on specific searches. There also have been reports of federal and local police misuse of Flock networks for tracking reproductive health travel or stalking without warrants.
In recent months, there is a growing national pushback about the technology and its use by immigration officialswho cite mass surveillance, privacy violations and police data abuses. At least two congressional bills, filed from both Republican and Democratic sponsors, seek to ban the cameras by threatening to withhold federal funds from cities that use them.
Whether these automated cameras violate the Fourth Amendment is an unsettled legal issue.
Limiting License Plate Readers
It was an automatic license plate reader that helped track down the Brown University shooting suspect far from Providence, RI, in December. New York City’s congestion pricing program charges vehicles entering Manhattan south of 61st Street using an extensive network of automatic license plate readers and E-ZPass infrastructure to enforce compliance.
But tracking tales concerning individual incidents are failing to curb wider concern about unlimited surveillance, driven, inevitably, by artificial intelligence – sorry, Superintelligence. Minneapolis is among the cities to have reacted against the license plate readers when border police swarmed the city in a visible campaign to locate migrants for deportation. San Diego is another. In Texas, 14 cities or counties have dropped contracts for cameras and frozen funds.
According to a NPR discussion, last year, Flock had pilot programs with U.S. Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security investigations that the company later acknowledged it had not communicated clearly about. Flock says that pilot program has ended, and that ICE cannot directly access their databases.
But officials and journalists have found evidence in search logs maintained by federal agencies that Homeland Security still can get information when it wants it. It is unclear what happens if Homeland or Justice would subpoena the companies to demand this data.
Two bills are before Congress. The Ban Flock Act introduced this month by Sen. Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, D-NY, and Sen. Jeff Merkley, D-Ore., would prohibit federal agencies from using ALPRs and cut off federal funding to state and local governments that use them. The Flock-Off Act Introduced by Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky., seeks to strip federal funding from municipalities that operate covered automated camera systems, though it has drawn debate over its broader impact on red light and speed cameras.
The ACLU argues that where we drive is none of the government’s business, organizing a“Get the Flock Out” campaign, organizing local pushbacks, calling for complete bans on ALPR networks.
Terry H. Schwadron retired as a senior editor at The New York Times, Deputy Managing Editor at The Los Angeles Times and leadership jobs at The Providence (RI) Journal-Bulletin. He was part of a Pulitzer Gold Medal team in Los Angeles, and his team part of several Pulitzers in New York.