cross-posted from: https://hexbear.net/post/9505259
cross-posted from: https://news.abolish.capital/post/77371
Flock Security likes to describe its national private network of cameras and license plate scanners as a public safety boon. “I can think of no greater mission than rescuing our children,” tweeted Flock CEO Garrett Langley, sharing a promotional company video. “Another childremoved suspect located and arrested with help from Flock,” chief strategy officer Rahul Sidhu posted last month. Last week, venture capital firm and Flock investor Andreessen Horowitz put the company’s benefits in civilizational terms: “Flock eliminates crime. Decline is a choice.”
Though Flock’s investors and executives insist its surveillance dragnet thwarts the most serious of crimes, it turns out police are also using the company’s technology to go after some of the pettiest possible offenses: curfew violations, loitering, and simply being homeless.
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When police seek footage from Flock’s more than 120,000 cameras nationwide, they select a category of crime corresponding with the alleged offense they are investigating, such as hit-and-run or burglary. Among the choices is the supposed crime of being suspicious in public, formally categorized by Flock as “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”
Records obtained from the police department in Plano, Illinois, reveal that law enforcement agencies nationwide have tapped into cameras in that small town — and thousands more cameras elsewhere — more than 1,200 times while investigating alleged “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations.”
As this data set reflects only searches of Flock cameras operated by Plano police alone, this is assuredly just a tiny fraction of the total number of “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” investigations using Flock nationwide. Records hosted by the website Have I Been Flocked? — which aggregates such logs — show hundreds more of these loitering searches in other states.
The Plano searches were conducted by police departments throughout Illinois, from neighboring states, and from a Georgia town more than 600 miles away. Many queries were license plate searches pertaining specific vehicles; others show police surveilling people on foot for the crime of essentially standing suspiciously.
Flock did not respond to a request for comment.
Police in Norcross, Georgia, for example, conducted a smartphone-based search on January 31 with “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” as the stated justification. It tapped into data recorded by 6,098 different Flock camera networks, including Plano’s, each consisting of an untold number of separate cameras that surveilled anyone who moved past them.
The search logs obtained by The Intercept do not break out “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations” separately, so it is unknown in each case what exactly police were searching for. In some cases police appended extra information; the Tennessee Bureau of Investigation, for example, searched over 17,000 Flock cameras while investigating “Curfew/Loitering/Vagrancy Violations – Suspicious person at planned protest site.”
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When asked about these queries, Tennessee Bureau of Investigation spokesperson Josh DeVine told The Intercept that the searches in fact originated with the state’s Tennessee Fusion Center, which is operated by both the TBI and the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security. DeVine referred The Intercept’s questions to the Tennessee Department of Safety and Homeland Security, which did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Flock cameras have also been used to zero in on the homeless: Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, shared Flock search data from the West Palm Beach Police Department with The Intercept that included a query pegged to an “outside agency dropping vagrant off” in the city.
In January, police in LaGrange, Georgia, searched more than 6,000 Flock networks on the basis that someone walked out of a house “with a significant amount of traffic.” Officers from the same agency earlier this year searched more than 15,000 Flock systems because of someone “lingering at a stop sign around midnight last night.”
In the data reviewed by The Intercept, most of these loitering searches didn’t include any corresponding case number, suggesting these queries were not part of broader criminal investigations. Some of the searches reviewed by The Intercept note a “suspicious” person spotted outdoors, without any additional justification for the dragnet.
Jay Stanley — a senior policy analyst at the American Civil Liberties Union’s speech, privacy, and technology project — told The Intercept these searches indicate surveillance mission creep. “This is in line with what we see with these technologies sold on the basis of movie plot scenario, dramatic ‘saving the day.’ And yet when you look under the hood, they’re often used to nickel and dime people for the most prosaic offenses,” he said. “They become part of many departments’ over-policing.”
Loitering and vagrancy laws have an ignoble history across the country as pretextual statutes, many originating in the Jim Crow era, for the targeting of Black Americans guilty of nothing other than existing in public. Some of these laws have been struck down because of the extent to which they criminalize the most mundane behaviors: standing, walking, or simply hanging out. In 1972, the Supreme Court deemed unconstitutional a Jacksonville, Florida, loitering ordinance targeting, among other things, “persons wandering or strolling around from place to place without any lawful purpose or object” and “habitual loafers.”
Stanley pointed out that any guardrails against abuse of Flock’s camera networks is entirely self-enforced by the company, which has an interest in police using it as much as possible, and self-oversight by the police themselves. “We know that police stations don’t seem to be doing this,” he added. “Most police departments are not really paying attention.”
The post Cops Are Using Flock to Spy on People for the Crime of Standing Around appeared first on The Intercept.
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7 Comments
TrippinMallard@lemmy.ml · 8 pts · 22h
They're really grasping for anything to justify their existence to investors.
eldavi@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 11h
their investors are pushing for it because mexico proved that it was necessary for them to keep their control over us.
they saw social media accidentally promoting the popularity of protests in mexico back 2017 resulting in mexicans breaking their political duopoly while leading to them electing a president that's hostile to the epstein class and it scared tf out of them -- it made the insurance rates shoot through the roof and now iran is leveraging this same tactic to bring the us empire to its knees.
CCRhode@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 11h
Yeah, I don't know what's going down, so, one of these days I suppose, I'll get pinched.
I live in a medium-sized town with a dozen Flock cameras, which the police shrouded in garbage bags a couple of weeks ago (to defuse public outrage and ward off vandalism I suppose). Two days ago, the Common Council voted to break the Flock contract. The issue has been unsatisfactorily explained in the news. I mean — what did city government think would happen to the data? Surely they knew it would be kept for awhile and be searched. News makes it sound like they flipped when Flock tried to sell them a five-year traffic-pattern analysis.
The story (above) shines a (feeble) light on what may have gone wrong. It appears that police have been taking license numbers of cars that have been parked in shady locations and running those numbers against cameras all over creation to see whether they get hits in other parts of the country. The last thing local authorities want is an out-of-town authority charging in and following a lead on a suspicious vehicle up to no good in around here. That's not what they bought the Flock cameras and put them up for. They were misled that the data would remain local for local use. I still don't get the angst, though.
All I know is that I can't get a hamburger to go, drive to a city park, eat it, and take a half-hour nap without some plain-clothes cop or vigilante waking me to ask what I'm waiting for.
leanleft@lemmy.ml · 4 pts · 9h
tennessee, florida, georgia . if you live in a crappy place.. you know it. move somewhere better.
i see the concern. but takeaway could be percieved as: "cops using cameras as cameras".
whats the issue?
Malica@lemmy.zip · 1 pts · 2h
Moving these days costs 10k+, people can't afford that shit
FoxAlive@lemmy.zip · 3 pts · 9h
Just for reference we used to forcefully institutionalize the unwanted of our society and send them to medical facilities where they where medically tortured and experimented on. After world war two the more superior natzi doctors we absorbed through operation paper clip took this further and that's where we get all the Mk ultra lore.
The laws where set up so if you where black you basicially couldnt be outside in public/loiter. It effected anyone who was disenfranchised/a vagrant but many of the laws stemmed from racism first. There where lots of little weird laws like you can't stand around outside without a dollar in your pocket. Essentially if you where not a white American home owning man with a job, and you where just outside, cops had some excuse to get you off the street and into jail or some institution. And to get thrown in a mental institution things like being homeless or a prostitute was considered being crazy. There where so many ways to jail you or put you in essentially what is natzi medical institutions that absolutely remove your rights. Everyone loved eugenics back then it was considered a science like medicine, and now we have people like RFK that want to bring that back.
Its pretty much exactly how the prison complex works just back then they got the added bonus of experimenting on people for the sake of biological, and psychological war fare, and we had to do small stuff like teach a kid to studder and pyscologically torture them for their disability and make it worse. There where so many rapes at these places too. This is where most of our major medical/pharma companies really took off.
Like I cannot express how we where doing essentially the same thing the natzis did in the concentration camps, because much like ai, if we didnt do it the bad guys would first. We need our evil companies to dominate the world. I'm not trying to lessen the inpact of the holocaust but trying to convey how there was a thin line between us and them, they just had more direct targeted racism, and much larger scale. Most of the world was like that, much like how today much of the world is turning very anti-imagrant and right wing authoritian. Japan, Australia, much of Europe/England, its not just the united States build the wall types anymore, it feels like every nation is pushing this weird mindset at once at a time we are trying to force everyone to get I'D verified to use the heavily survalienced internet. And for what? In the states we have ICE buying out massive amounts of old prisons as if we are going to infinitely expand this operation.
Now we got RFK taking about rounding up vagrants, removing food stamps and medical care from people who don't have a job, which is extreamly hard to do when you don't have a house or car, and forcing them into labor camps. We have survalience state networks not just flock, and that's getting all processed through systems at or like palantir and its making logs of everyone, and the homeless and disenfranchised are the first to experience the full brunt of that force. We are essentially going back down the same route and setting up the same system.
Fucking deep space nine predicted this would happen with the bell riots like two years ago or something in their timeline of the show.
derry@midwest.social · 3 pts · 8h
Plano Illinois? What is up with that? Odd town to be running data requests for. You'll probably get some tweakers or something.