The Pushback Against Flock Camera Surveillance

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. On today's show, we will return to the cyclosporiasis outbreak linked mostly to iceberg lettuce and we'll add the newer salmonella outbreak being tied to jalapenos. It's been about a month already since the New York Times ran a headline that said New Yorkers get squeamish about salad lunches amid parasite outbreak. And we know that many of you are still confused. Lena Sun, National Health Reporter for The Washington Post will answer your questions. Another mystery, why New York City reading scores declined so much over the last school year, according to the latest statewide test results. Third grade success rates down 14 points just from last year. Is that even possible? Our education reporter, Jessica Gould, will try to explain what may be real or not real there. And elementary school teachers who might be listening, we will be inviting you to call in to help us report what's really going on with the kids, or with the tests, or with the phonics approach to reading, or whatever else may be real or unreal there. That's coming up in about an hour, that one. And near the end of the show, we'll ask if you approve of those bright green, hard to remove stickers being slapped on cars in the city, that don't obey the alternate side of the street parking rules. They used to do this, then they stopped doing this, now they're doing it again. And we'll ask what other forms of public shaming, for what other bad behaviors might you like to see? How about something special for people who don't clean up after their dogs? That's all coming up.
But we start with the increasing use of and backlash against flock cameras. Do you know about these yet? The word is flock.
F-L-O-C-K, like flock of seagulls. Over 40 percent of police departments nationwide are now partnered with this company called Flock, which provides AI powered automatic license plate readers. There are at least 120,000 flock cameras scattered across every state in the country, except Alaska.
We are told, and most of the data from those cameras is funneled into national databases or a national database that allows users to track a car's movement. And while police say the cameras are helping to solve crimes, critics argue that the whole system is a gross invasion of privacy. Now, if you only recently learned about Flock, it's probably because of some controversial headlines. Maybe you saw in April, Wisconsin cops used Flock to track a man across state lines to create a pretext to search his car for weed. Last year, Texas police tracked down a woman who had self-administered an abortion. There have also been examples of abusive cops using the technology to stalk their exes. And one of the biggest Flock related news stories of the past year is, not surprisingly, about how ICE has been using the database to locate undocumented immigrants with the help of local law enforcement. So given these examples of alleged overreach, it's probably no surprise that people have been pushing back against the explosion of the technology. Activists are essentially arguing the cameras are calcifying an already growing surveillance state. And notably, a lot of the criticism is bipartisan. There is criticism from the right as well as the left will explain why.
And my guest on this is Jason Koebler, a founder of 404 Media, which has been covering Flock and the pushback against it for several years, and actually broke several of the stories that I just referred to. Hi, Jason. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Jason Koebler** (3:56)
Hey, Brian. Thank you so much for having me.

**Brian Lehrer** (3:57)
So before we get into the examples of overreach in a little more detail than in the intro and the pushback, can you give everybody a sense of Flock's pitch, so to speak? How is the company selling itself to local police departments as a crime fighting tool?

**Jason Koebler** (4:14)
Yeah, the pitch more or less is Flock will come to a city or town and say, we can solve your stolen vehicle problem. These cameras basically sit at intersections and they take a record of every car that drives past them. And they have this system called a hot list, meaning police can put in a license plate. And if that car is seen on the Flock network, the police will get an alert that will tell them where the car was seen, at what time, and in what direction it was heading. And so Flock will say, we can use this to recover stolen vehicles, we can use this to find abducted children, we can use this to find missing people. And it's also kind of become this first step in the investigative process where, if someone reports a crime, police will look up a suspect's license plate in Flock system to try to find them.