Flock surveillance cameras raise constitutional questions, bipartisan US senators say

Filed 1h ago · Via Michigan Advance · The Buffoon Desk

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Covert Affair

Kevin MacLeod · incompetech.com · CC BY 4.0

Photo: Chris Willis from Palo Alto, California, USA · CC BY 2.0 · via Wikimedia Commons

A Senate Judiciary subcommittee examined Flock Safety's network of over 120,000 license-plate cameras, installed in every state but Hawaii, after a Florida woman spent 13 days in jail when a camera photographed her car three miles from a fatal crash involving a similarly modeled vehicle of a different color. Flock's CEO was invited to testify and did not appear.

Senators from both parties raised Fourth Amendment concerns, since law enforcement agencies can access the shared database without a warrant, and cited reported abuses including officers using the system to track ex-partners and ICE reading plates for immigration enforcement despite Flock denying it has a contract with the agency. An Arizona sheriff testified he dropped his Flock contract after the company insisted its image resolution couldn't identify people, even as he could recognize faces in the sample photos himself.

Senators also raised the prospect of the database being used to track people seeking abortion care or attending gun shows, concerns an ACLU witness said were closer to reality than most people think.

The full dispatch is available from the source below.

✒ FROM THE EDITORIAL DESK

A company that skips its own oversight hearing while insisting its cameras can't make out a face, then gets called out by a sheriff who says he can read the face fine, has already answered the question it wouldn't show up to answer. Thirteen days in a cell over a car that was the wrong color is the kind of detail that should end a contract fast, and apparently did, at least in one county. The rest of the country is still deciding whether a camera company gets to grade its own eyesight.

Source: Read the original at Michigan Advance → Scored: Covert Affair · Kevin MacLeod · CC BY 4.0

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