Support CleanTechnica's work through a Substack subscription, on Patreon, or on Stripe. Help us produce all of the high-quality, original content we publish week after week despite the challenges of content-scraping AI, antisocial media, inflation, and other hurdles.
“If you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about.” That is the mantra of those who believe surveillance technology is a public benefit. The UK has perhaps the largest number of security cameras per capita of any nation, and its citizens seem to be perfectly happy knowing they are being observed every moment of every day while outdoors. But surveillance has a potentially darker side. In the late 1800’s, Jeremy Bentham proposed a way to control prisoners by housing them in a a circular structure he called a Panopticon.
The guards would be located in a central area, with the prison cells arranged around them. This would allow the guards to observe the prisoners every moment of the day. Because the prisoners would never know when they were being watched, they would voluntarily refrain from inappropriate behavior, which in turn would allow the prison to operate with fewer guards than would otherwise be needed.
Flock License Plate Reading Cameras
In 2020, a company by the name of Flock Security started installing small license plate tracking cameras in certain neighborhoods. It’s business proposition was simple. It marketed itself to police departments by claiming its cameras could help them find stolen cars, locate wanted people, and solve crimes.
Today, Flock Safety is valued at more than $8 billion and has about 120,000 cameras installed throughout the United States. It has contracts with 40 percent of all police departments in the US. It has become the digital equivalent of Bentham’s Panopticon, although in this case it is not just prisoners who are under surveillance, it is the entire population.
Danielle Citron, a professor of law at the University of Virginia, told the New York Times recently, “We all expect and deserve privacy. The problem is that we typically cannot feel, see, or experience the loss as it is happening. Seeing those cameras is a punch in the gut. We see them and it says you have no room to just be, to go about your day feeling lost in the crowd.”
Flock And The Fourth Amendment
The right of privacy, although recognized in most countries, is not specifically set forth in the US Constitution. The closest the US gets to it is the Fourth Amendment, which says, “The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
Millions of words have been written about what is or isn’t a permissible intrusion by the government into private lives and it is fair to say that the question is far from settled. According to USCourts.gov, “Whether a particular type of search is considered reasonable in the eyes of the law, is determined by balancing two important interests. On one side of the scale is the intrusion on an individual’s Fourth Amendment rights. On the other side of the scale are legitimate government interests, such as public safety. The extent to which an individual is protected by the Fourth Amendment depends, in part, on the location of the search or seizure.”
Antonin Scalia is considered one of the most notable conservative Supreme Court judges ever. You might think he would be a fierce supporter of the ability of the police to pursue law and order goals. But in fact, in the case of Kyollo Vs. US in 2001, he voted to invalidate a conviction of a marijuana grower. In that case, the police used a thermo imaging camera to determine the attic of the defendant’s home was unusually hot.
They raided the home and found an array of “grow lights” being used to cultivate marijuana. “Grow lights” give off a lot of heat and that heat is what the cameras outside the house detected. Scalia ruled the police needed to obtain a warrant before searching the home — much to the surprise of Scalia’s most ardent supporters.
The Danger Of Surveillance
What many do not realize is that all 120,000+ Flock license plate reading cameras are linked together in a nationwide database. Those with access to that database know which hot sheet motel a philandering spouse is frequenting. who we meet with. and who is slipping across a state border to seek reproductive health services. In Texas, where 700 Flock cameras are now in operation., concerns about the cameras have united both progressives and conservatives in an unlikely coalition that opposes adding more cameras and wants those already installed removed.
Los Angeles and Dayton, Ohio recently suspended their contracts with Flock to prevent immigration authorities from accessing data from the cameras. Dayton resorted to covering the cameras with trash bags. In cities like Houston, Oakland, California, and Grand Junction, Colorado, residents have taken matters into their own hands, with police reports and surveillance footage documenting Flock cameras being cut down, splattered with paint, and even being disabled by gunfire.
Knoxville County mayor Glenn Jacobs told NewsNation in an interview, “They’re just collecting data as an active surveillance system, and every car that passes through, the data is collected from that car license plate, using AI. They make a vehicle fingerprint of the car that includes distinguishing features, make, model, color, bumper stickers, roof racks, all these different things. They’re just pulling everything in. And then it’s retained for sometimes 30 days or more in a searchable database.”
Action & Reaction
The founder of Flock Safety is Garrett Langley, who told The Hill that his surveillance equipment manufacturing company started out because of his frustration with crime rates in his home city of Atlanta. “Crime felt too easy to get away with,” Langley said during a TED talk in April. “It didn’t make sense that you could steal someone’s car … or you could kill someone and have a 50 percent chance of getting away with it. … So I did what engineers do. I built a license plate-reading camera.”
For every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. In this case, that reaction takes the firm of DeFlock, an organization whose mission it to raise awareness about automatic license plate readers and “the threats they pose to personal privacy and civil liberties.” On its website, people can search for known Flock camera locations in their area. “Camera locations come from volunteers and the OpenStreetMap community, not a private company or government agency,” DeFlock says. Naturally, it has an app that people can download.
DeFlock was started by Will Freeman in 2024. He now lives in Boulder, Colorado, where he the local police department for any information it had collected about him using Flock cameras. The police refused his request, saying “there is no reasonable expectation of privacy on publicly owned streets and sidewalks.” Freeman filed suit to force the department to release the data he requested and called the Flock system a “warrantless surveillance dragnet.” He told the New York Times, “It feels bad to always be watched and scrutinized.”
The ACLU has gotten into the act with a campaign it calls “What The Flock!” On its website, it says, “We have already seen how this mass surveillance tool can be weaponized and abused by law enforcement. ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants. Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.”
Setting Social Boundaries
The old adage that “If you haven’t done anything wrong, you’ve got nothing to worry about” trips easily off the tongue, but it is of little use when a law enforcement officer is pointing a loaded weapon at you and telling you to get on the ground. Langley says, “It’s going to be an ongoing debate probably forever. We should have this debate and we should continue to evolve our point of view as a society of what we’re comfortable with and what level of safety we want.” It’s possible the issue could make its way to the Supreme Court eventually.
Texas Congressman Keith Self, a Republican whose district is north of Dallas, has introduced a bill that would require federal law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant before accessing or querying data collected by state and local surveillance systems, license plate readers among them. Somewhere, Antonin Scalia is smiling.
Sign up for CleanTechnica's Weekly Substack for Zach and Scott's in-depth analyses and high level summaries, sign up for our daily newsletter, and follow us on Google News!
Have a tip for CleanTechnica? Want to advertise? Want to suggest a guest for our CleanTech Talk podcast? Contact us here.
Sign up for our daily newsletter for 15 new cleantech stories a day. Or sign up for our weekly one on top stories of the week if daily is too frequent.
CleanTechnica uses affiliate links. See our policy here.
CleanTechnica's Comment Policy