Congressman Vows To ‘Rein In’ Spread of Surveillance Cameras Nationwide

A member of Congress who recently had his own run-in with the law that involved a Flock automated license plate reading camera is vowing to kick off an effort to “rein in” the systems that are popping up all over the country.The cameras take photos of every passing car, logging the plate, vehicle type, time, and location. The data is uploaded to a cloud network and cross-referenced with crime databases like the National Crime Information Center.Congressman Marlin Stutzman’s interest in Flock cameras came after a routine drive home turned into a privacy wake-up call. He said he recently pulled into his driveway only to find a police officer pulling in right behind him. The officer had been alerted by a Flock Safety annotated license plate reader that The Indiana Republican’s vehicle registration had expired. The encounter left the congressman shaken — not by the expired tag, but by the realization that his movements had been quietly tracked.“I think that this is a step too far,” Mr. Stutzman said on the Just the News’ “No Noise” podcast on Friday. “There has to be boundaries. There have to be controls in place. You know, of course, you can always argue, ‘Well, we’re able to catch the bad guys,’ but you know what? There’s 95 percent good people out there doing the right thing.”“There’s several of us that are going to start looking at some legislation to rein these in, to be sure that it’s not crossing the line and invading people’s privacy,” he added. Congressman Thomas Massie posted less than an hour after Mr. Stutzman’s appearance announcing that he would be filing a bill to ban federal funding for surveillance cameras. Flock Safety has deployed roughly 120,000 automatic license plate recognition and pan-tilt-zoom cameras across the United States, capturing tens of billions of vehicle data points every month. Because cameras are networked nationwide, a police officer in one state can be alerted if a vehicle of interest is spotted in another — a feature that has drawn fierce criticism from civil liberties advocates.Privacy concerns have been compounded by documented cases of police misusing the system. In Savannah, Georgia, the police department terminated four sworn officers and two civilian employees last week following an internal investigation into unauthorized use of the department’s Flock system. The Georgia Bureau of Investigation launched independent criminal probes into all six cases. Investigators found that employees had been running searches on personal acquaintances and family members. One officer was found to have given an unauthorized outside agency access to the department’s Flock system.That case is far from isolated. According to a report by 404 Media, more than a dozen police officers across the country have been accused of or arrested for using Flock to harass and stalk individuals, including former partners.The backlash has extended beyond city council chambers. Across the country, citizens have taken matters into their own hands — cutting cameras down with electric saws in upstate New York, throwing paint on lenses in Oakland, California, and ramming poles with vehicles in Idaho. A crowdsourced website offers a map of where the cameras are located. In Winona, Minnesota, the pushback was particularly dramatic. On August 1, the Winona Police Department discovered its entire network of Flock cameras had gone dark. Officers dispatched to four highway locations found that the metal mounting poles for all eight cameras had been sawed off near the base. The camera units had been removed and stolen. The estimated replacement cost: $24,000.Winona is not alone. Similar incidents have been reported across Minnesota, including in Duluth, Plymouth, Edina, Eden Prairie, and Minnetonka, where cameras have been stolen, spray-painted, or had their power cords sliced.Meanwhile, a growing number of municipalities have ended their Flock contracts, including Fort Collins, Colorado; Eugene, Oregon; Madison, Wisconsin; Knoxville, Tennessee; and Syracuse, New York. However, canceling Flock does not necessarily mean an end to automatic license plate surveillance.Several cities that dropped Flock have moved straight to competitors, most notably Axon. Denver, Syracuse, Ferndale, Michigan, and others have signed new automatic license plate recognition contracts with Axon, which offers similar camera technology but without Flock’s nationwide search network — a key distinction for some officials.“As far as data sharing under this contract, Axon does not have a national network. There’s no way that we can share it nationally,” a Denver City Council member, Kevin Flynn, said, according to Denver7, explaining the city’s rationale for the switch. “No law enforcement officer in Texas, Ohio, New York, or California can log into our system. It’s only Denver Police officers and only when they’re investigating an actual criminal incident,” he said. “Any misuse is punishable by the Denver police discipline matrix.”But critics warn that trading one surveillance vendor for another sidesteps the more fundamental question of whether mass vehicle tracking — regardless of the company behind it — should require a warrant at all.

Congressman Vows To ‘Rein In’ Spread of Surveillance Cameras Nationwide

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