Since roughly the 1960s, when police and local governments began experimenting with private security camera networks, and especially after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, it became legally unreasonable for Americans to have any expectation of privacy in a public place.
But in a rare moment of political camaraderie, Americans appear united across party lines in their demand for privacy against what they call a growing intruder: Flock Safety.
“You are seeing a sort of right-wing libertarian push and a left-wing libertarian push against the Flock cameras,” conservative commentator Ben Shapiro recently said, about the company that has become the face of an entire industry.
The company is one of many that create automated license plate readers, or ALPRS, that thousands of municipalities — including in Utah — use across the country to deter crime and catch criminals.
During his monthly press conference, Utah’s Republican Gov. Spencer Cox said he was “deeply concerned” about recent news stories where law enforcement abused the surveillance technology.
But he said Utah has “been in the forefront of really trying to put guardrails around the use of those types of technologies to protect citizens’ privacy.”
Utah law sets nine months as the maximum period for retaining surveillance footage captured on the ALPRs. The law also limits when officers can access ALPR information and prohibits using ALPR data for civil immigration enforcement.
Those against Flock accuse the product of being used as an Orwellian mass surveillance tool that violates Americans’ privacy rights under the 4th Amendment — a technology designed to protect the public can, perhaps too easily, become a tool for abuse.
It seems a regular occurrence to see articles about a law enforcement officer abusing ALPR surveillance footage to spy on their wife or scorned lover.
Cox said he directed the state’s Privacy Commission to review the rules governing the cameras, particularly their use by local law enforcement, after a Utah Civic Compact investigation found that 10 cameras in a single Utah county were searched 5.1 million times by police agencies across 45 states.
But Utah law enforcement officers previously told the Deseret News that ALPRs are used, but not limited to, tracking down perpetrators of robberies, aggravated assaults, homicides and fatal hit-and-run investigations.
Last week, law enforcement in New York stopped an “ISIS-Inspired Terror Plot” at the state’s Capitol building with the help of the surveillance technology.
“Whoever is against having those cameras, think about this,” John Sarcone III, First Assistant U.S. Attorney for the Northern District of New York, said during a press conference regarding the foiled attack.
“If you don’t have Flock cameras, how are law enforcement going to detect and see somebody walking around, possibly looking to blow up your state capitol or commit terrorist acts?” he asked, urging the public to push their city leaders to increase the deployment of the ALPRs.
Changing tactics, some aren’t buying it
Since becoming the target of public scrutiny, Flock has lost dozens of contracts with cities that used their surveillance technology, according to DeFlock, a crowdsourced map project of ALPR cameras.
However, concerned residents are discovering that in some instances, city councils are simply starting contracts with different ALPR vendors, per The Guardian.
Likely because of public scrutiny and lost business, Flock Safety founder Garrett Langley released new policy changes to strengthen public trust and create a society where “safety and privacy can coexist.”
The changes, he said, fall under three categories: Safety, security and accountability:
Data sharing is now disabled by default, searches are recorded in audit logs and customers can set their own retention periods within applicable legal requirements, Langley explained.
Flock also reduced the default retention period for license plate reader data from 30 days to seven days, after which the data is deleted unless an agency has configured a different retention period. Flock said it also does not sell customer data, use it for advertising or share it with third parties without the customer’s permission.
“The privacy changes, the security changes, the accountability systems, come down to one idea: Tools this powerful must come with guardrails this strong,” he said. “This is the standard we are holding ourselves to from this day forward and is the standard we invite our industry, our legislators, and the communities we serve to hold us to.”
Since the policy announcements, the company’s skeptics remain skeptical.
The American Civil Liberties Union called it a “thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system” and “largely hollow security promises, rather than an earnest effort to address them.”