Notes ·
Six More Employees Fired for Abusing Flock Camera Data
The Savannah Police Department has fired four officers and two civilian employees after finding they had misused its Flock Safety license plate database.
Investigators found employees searching for family members and personal acquaintances rather than for legitimate police work. One officer also gave someone at another law-enforcement agency unauthorized access to Savannah's Flock system. All six cases have been referred to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation for a separate criminal investigation.
Savannah says an audit found 127 inappropriate searches among roughly 39,000 searches this year. The department has now moved to weekly audits of Flock activity.
This follows the other cases we have been watching where officers used automated license plate databases to search for partners, former partners, coworkers and other people for personal reasons.
Flock argues that these cases demonstrate its auditing system works because misuse can be discovered and punished. There is some truth to that. Savannah found these searches through its auditing tools.
But an audit log is not an access control.
It tells us who abused the surveillance system after they already searched it.
Savannah already had mandatory training, role-based access controls, supervisory oversight and automatic logging. Six employees still decided that a nationwide database of people's movements was something they could use for personal purposes.
At some point repeated abuse stops looking like a handful of exceptional bad actors and starts looking like a predictable risk of giving thousands of people searchable access to everyone else's movements.