License Plate and Switch

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Citizens across the nation have been pushing back this year against what they view as a particularly threatening invasion of their privacy. Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) made by a company named Flock Safety have become the focus of this conflict. But to temper the backlash, communities have been switching out Flock cameras for different ALPRs with nearly identical capabilities, merely evading the negative connotation of the brand name while maintaining the surveillance.

Flock produces surveillance cameras used by police and private security firms to log the license plates of vehicles in a given area, and while they say these cameras are only for identifying vehicles, it’s been reported that they can also identify individuals. The company also hosts a data-sharing network that’s been the focus of its critics.

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One of the primary reasons Flock has become so controversial is that it’s been found that police officers across the nation have improperly used these cameras to stalk ex-lovers and monitor other people they know. It’s also been reported that Flock cameras are utilized by ICE, which has been the focus of increasing anger. Flock has massively expanded its camera network in recent years, which has drawn further attention to the company.

Backlash to Flock cameras has been prevalent on social media and through citizens showing up to town hall meetings, demanding that their community get rid of these cameras. People have also been ripping down Flock cameras. Some communities have responded, as over 100 Flock contracts have been canceled around the country.

William Lawrence, a Democrat running for Congress in a swing seat in Michigan who has spoken out at public meetings against Flock cameras and made this opposition a major facet of his campaign, told the Prospect that he would like to see these issues addressed at the federal level, not just locally.

“I think we should be viewing this as a Fourth Amendment violation and taking it seriously from the perspective of defending the Constitution and the Bill of Rights,” Lawrence said. “If I could vote for a federal bill to ban this kind of mass surveillance, I would be eager to.”

Although some localities have canceled Flock contracts, some have switched to using ALPRs made by a technology company named Axon. This company has been known for decades for providing police departments with body cameras and Tasers—in fact, the company was named Taser until 2017. The company has expanded to drones and other high-tech equipment for military and law enforcement use. Just last year, Axon got into the business of producing ALPRs, after previously partnering with Flock to integrate license plate surveillance into its existing technology. The Axon Outpost is a pole-mounted camera, and the Axon Lightpost is a so-called smart streetlight that uses the same technology partner as Flock.

The Denver, Colorado, city council voted to replace Flock cameras with Axon’s versions this March. Just last month, Kenosha, Wisconsin, did the same thing. Richmond, California, is currently evaluating such a switch.

The change is aggravating Flock critics who say changing the vendor involved doesn’t fix the problem. Lawrence said he doesn’t think this is “in the spirit of what people are asking for.”

“My fear is that there will be a Pyrrhic victory of winning the battle against Flock but losing the war against mass surveillance,” Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a law professor at George Washington University, told the Prospect. “There are ALPRs running in cities that don’t use Flock cameras, and all the same concerns you might have, like pattern recognition, parallel construction for investigations, and tracking people at sensitive spaces, still exist no matter the vendor selling the technology.”

Ferguson said the real target of public criticism should be “real-time crime centers,” which is essentially the data hub for law enforcement. That’s where they’re aggregating data from many different forms of surveillance.

The shift from Flock and its tainted image to the more obscure Axon is predictable, experts said, because Axon has been a quiet law enforcement partner for so long. “Axon, as a company, has always been pretty successful at leveraging its existing technological relationships with police departments into new contracts for new technologies,” said Beryl Lipton, a senior investigative researcher at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “Right now, the public backlash is so strong against Flock, and the public is not as well aware of the concerns with Axon and some of the other surveillance companies.”

Whether Axon is as bad as Flock is temporal, experts told me, because any concern people have with Flock that isn’t currently a concern with Axon could quickly become one. For example, Flock’s data-sharing network is currently viewed as more problematic than Axon’s, but that could easily change.

“Axon does have a slightly different way of facilitating data sharing, but it’s not as though they can’t facilitate data sharing comparable to Flock’s, and in some ways much more extensive, because Axon has been building an entire business model around the placement, integration, and analysis of all sorts of cameras,” Lipton said.

The Prospect reached out to Axon for comment and did not receive a response before this article was published.

Beyond cities and towns switching from Flock to Axon cameras, there’s also the concern that communities could move away from stationary cameras and toward drone surveillance. If you’re worried about people ripping down surveillance cameras, putting them up in the air might be a way to avoid that. Many communities are purchasing drones made by Flock and Axon.

“If I were worried about the cameras on my street, I’d also be worried about the drones flying overhead and the real-time crime center that can connect all the dots together,” Ferguson said.

Lipton said she wouldn’t be surprised to see more communities buying drones for surveillance going forward. She said many police departments around the country already have drones, and they could soon view them as an increasingly attractive surveillance platform.

“We’re already seeing drone adoption taking place, because there has been this framing that a police department needs a drone,” Lipton said. “Part of the modern police tool kit is to have drones. Between Flock’s and Axon’s marketing, the way they’ve communicated with local law enforcement, and the ways they’ve worked to make it easier for police to get the necessary FAA waivers to fly their drones, we’re seeing an uptick in the use of drones.”

The backlash against Flock has been impressive, but if cities start switching to Axon and acting as if that solves the problem, then the work activists are doing to fight surveillance won’t have made the difference they were hoping for. If surveillance drones become more ubiquitous, the capabilities of those platforms raise the stakes even higher.

“This has been a creeping surveillance state for several decades now. If this happens to be the point at which people draw the line and say no further, then I celebrate that,” Lawrence said. “Let’s draw the line, and then let’s take this as an opportunity to say no further and … begin to roll [it] back.”

The post appeared first on The American Prospect.