Notes ·
Flock Employees Don't Like Being Watched Either
Joshua MorrisAtlanta News First investigative reporter Brendan Keefe saw a Flock camera being upgraded near his home and went out to document the installation. He parked on the public street, put on a high-visibility vest, displayed press identification in his vehicle, and began filming from a distance.
The Flock installer noticed him, packed up his equipment and drove away. Keefe followed several cars behind because he wanted to see whether the installer was heading to another camera location.
The installer called 911 and said he felt followed and harassed.
Three police vehicles eventually stopped Keefe.
I don't want to completely dismiss the employee's reaction because I can understand why being photographed and then seeing the same vehicle behind you could make someone uncomfortable. Flock has also said that some of its employees and contractors have received threats, and there have been cases where people confronting installers crossed well beyond peaceful criticism. Nobody installing a camera deserves to be threatened or attacked.
But there is something important buried inside that discomfort.
The Flock employee did not like being watched.
Neither do the rest of us.
It feels different when the camera points back
During the traffic stop, the responding officer explained that the installer was worried about being identified and appearing in the news. He was concerned that people might discover who he was or target him or his family.
That is an entirely human concern.
It is also remarkably close to the concern people have about Flock cameras.
Keefe asked the obvious question: was the employee entitled to privacy while working in a public place when Flock's entire argument is that vehicles traveling through public places can be photographed because there is no reasonable expectation that a license plate will remain private?
The officer did not claim that he was. In fact, body-camera footage shows the officer telling her supervisor that Keefe had been following at a distance and had not been driving closely enough to break any laws or give the appearance that he was stalking the installer.
About 17 minutes later, Keefe was allowed to leave.
Flock subsequently said it does not object to members of the public or press photographing its cameras or employees in public. The company says employees are nevertheless encouraged to contact police if they feel threatened, harassed or followed.
That is reasonable as an employee-safety policy.
It is also a fascinating demonstration of the difference between an abstract argument about privacy and actually becoming the subject of observation.
One photograph is not really the issue
Flock makes a fair technical distinction about its license plate readers that I think is worth preserving.
The standard Flock LPR is not continuously filming a person as they travel around town. According to Flock, it captures point-in-time images of vehicles as they pass a camera. Those records can include the license plate, an image of the vehicle, characteristics such as make and color, and metadata including the time and camera location.
At one camera, that is one observation.
The problem changes when there are cameras everywhere.
Atlanta News First reports that Flock's network now includes roughly 120,000 license plate readers. Flock says its systems are used by thousands of law-enforcement agencies and private customers.
One camera knows that my truck passed one intersection at 8:17 in the morning.
Another knows I passed somewhere else at 8:34.
Another sees me at 9:02.
Put enough of those observations into the same searchable system and "we don't continuously track anyone" starts becoming a distinction with considerably less practical comfort.
A collection of individual observations can become a history of movement.
That is what concerns me.
The public never really consented to this network
I understand why police departments like these systems.
If someone steals a car, abducts a child or commits a violent crime and investigators know what vehicle they are looking for, being able to find where that vehicle was recently seen can be extremely valuable.
There are real cases where Flock cameras have helped police locate missing people and solve serious crimes.
My objection is not that the technology is incapable of doing anything useful.
My objection is the surveillance architecture we have built in order to get that usefulness.
Millions of innocent people have their vehicles photographed and indexed because one of those vehicles might someday become relevant to an investigation.
We have gradually accepted systems where everybody is collected first and suspicion comes later.
I don't think that should be the default relationship between ordinary people and government.
There should never have been a nationwide network of Flock cameras quietly recording where everyone's vehicles appear in the first place.
If police have a reason to track a particular person or vehicle, we already have a legal system for investigations, warrants and judicial oversight. Building an enormous database of everyone's movements because the information might become useful later turns that model around.
Instead of investigating the suspect, we collect everyone and search backward after the fact.
That may be efficient.
Efficiency is not the only value worth protecting.
The possibility of misuse is no longer hypothetical
One reason I am increasingly uncomfortable with the "trust the safeguards" argument is that we now have real examples of those safeguards failing.
Just this week, the San Francisco Chronicle reported that a San Jose police officer had been fired after investigators concluded that he improperly used the department's Flock system while off duty to locate a domestic violence victim and passed her location to his cousin, the alleged abuser.
That is almost a perfect example of why access to location information deserves more protection than promises about acceptable-use policies.
Flock did not design its system for helping an alleged abuser locate a victim.
The police department did not authorize it for that purpose.
Policies prohibited that kind of personal use.
Someone with access allegedly did it anyway.
Flock has been adding stronger auditing, automatic detection of suspicious searches, mandatory case information and shorter default retention periods in response to incidents like these. Those are worthwhile safeguards.
They don't answer my larger question.
Why are we collecting all of this information about people who are not suspected of anything?
Security controls can reduce misuse.
The best way to prevent misuse of information is still not collecting the information in the first place.
Another Flock employee called police over cameras in June
This apparently wasn't even an isolated moment.
Atlanta News First found another incident from June involving people filming outside a Flock distribution facility in Georgia. A Flock employee called police and described the people filming as potentially armed several times, although he acknowledged to the dispatcher that he had not actually seen any weapons.
The employee was himself recording when officers arrived.
One of the officers apparently summarized the situation perfectly:
"Everybody's recording."
That sentence may be the most unintentionally accurate description of where we have ended up.
The creators confronted the Flock employee about the contradiction. Their point was essentially that Flock photographs people in public without asking permission, yet employees felt sufficiently uncomfortable when cameras were turned toward them that police became involved.
Flock said there had recently been another security incident at its headquarters and that employees had been receiving threats, which provides important context. Nobody should interpret criticism of surveillance technology as permission to intimidate individual workers.
But the underlying contradiction remains.
When surveillance is happening to millions of anonymous motorists, it is described as objective evidence collected in public.
When observation becomes personal, suddenly all of the human consequences become obvious.
Who is recording me?
Why are they doing it?
Where is this information going?
Who will see it?
Can they identify me?
Could this affect my family?
What happens next?
Those are exactly the questions the public has been asking about Flock.
Public doesn't have to mean permanently searchable
Flock's argument about license plates is legally straightforward: license plates are deliberately displayed on vehicles traveling on public roads.
That doesn't settle the policy question for me.
There is a huge difference between someone standing on a street corner seeing my car drive past and a machine automatically recording that observation, attaching a precise timestamp and location, classifying the vehicle, storing the information, and making it searchable later.
Technology changes the practical consequences of information that was technically public all along.
My neighbors are allowed to see me leave my house.
That doesn't mean I would be comfortable with one of them maintaining a searchable database containing every time I left, which direction I drove, when I returned, and everywhere else their friends happened to see me.
Scale changes things.
Persistence changes things.
Searchability changes things.
Aggregation changes things.
We understood this long before Flock existed. A person's movements through public places have always been observable, but historically following someone everywhere required time, people and effort. Those practical limitations created a form of privacy even when individual observations were public.
Automation removes that friction.
That deserves more scrutiny, not less.
Maybe the discomfort is useful
I actually feel for the installer in the original story.
He was trying to do his job. Suddenly somebody was photographing him. Then he noticed the same vehicle behind him. He did not know exactly who the person was or what they intended to do with the images.
I can understand why that felt invasive.
I wish Flock would sit with that feeling for a while.
The employee knew he was being observed. Most people driving past Flock cameras barely notice them.
The employee knew who was doing the recording. Most drivers probably don't know which agency or private company owns a camera they pass.
The employee could call police and say the observation made him uncomfortable.
The rest of us are mostly told that because we were traveling on a public road, we shouldn't expect privacy in the first place.
That asymmetry is what bothers me.
I don't want Flock employees harassed.
I don't want reporters harassed for documenting public surveillance technology either.
Mostly, I don't want us to normalize a country where everyone is quietly entered into a searchable movement database just because they drove down the street.
The Flock employee's reaction doesn't make him a hypocrite for feeling uncomfortable.
It makes him human.
Maybe his discomfort can help explain why so many other Americans feel exactly the same way about the cameras he was installing.
Read Atlanta News First's original investigation.
Read Flock Safety's own explanation of what its license plate readers collect.
Read the ACLU's guide to the right to photograph and record in public.