Flock cameras: 'Easiest, most effective solution? Don’t use the tech'

Word has been spreading around town about the new artificial intelligence surveillance system, installed by the Eugene Police Department (and coming soon to Springfield). You deserve to know what it does to you and your neighbors, and why it’s not safe to use. Period.

Branded as “automatic license-plate readers,” ALPRs sound more like a barcode scanner than a full-blown AI tracking system in the vein of facial recognition. But that’s what Flock’s ALPRs are. Even worse, the system has vast sharing networks and hair-raising analysis possibilities.

It’s true that in some places in the country, ALPRs have been used to convert images of plates into letters and numbers for, say, charging tolls on bridges. But that’s not the system we have here in Eugene that is rapidly spreading across Oregon.

The Flock system is subscription-model surveillance provided by a private venture capital company based in Georgia. Our police department leases the AI cameras, equipment, software and access to the searchable information-sharing and analysis platform.

At least 57 cameras across Eugene capture footage of anything that moves in their field of view; process the images with a chip inside the camera to ID objects (such as people, bicycles, vehicles, golf carts, etc.); and send that timestamped data along with the images to the cloud.

What this means is that practically everyone in town is being tracked. If your kids bike by a camera on their way home from school, they are captured by the system. Among other features, police can search the Flock database to find where a car has traveled or look up all vehicles with certain characteristics, such as “white truck with bumper stickers.”

Currently, the data is available for search by police for 30 days – unless an officer decides to download it. In the convenient Flock user portal, downloading data is as easy as a single click.

This system puts marginalized communities at serious risk. Two members of Congress, Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, D-Ill., and Rep. Robert Garcia, D-Calif., have launched an investigation into Flock “over its role in enabling invasive surveillance practices that threaten the privacy, safety and civil liberties of women, immigrants and other vulnerable Americans,” according to a press release.

Flock is notoriously averse to independent review, and as recently as July 30, CEO Garrett Langley refused to rule out selling its service to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

But the reality is, ICE can already get access to our data. One of the major red flags with this system is the built-in sharing capabilities. The Flock system enables police departments to share the collected information broadly – both to police departments in specific regions and to the Flock national database that any user can plug into.

EPD has automatic sharing turned on for all of Oregon, but it won’t tell us exactly who can access our data. If EPD denies an ICE request, another agency may grant it. Or an officer embedded with a federal agency may share information. Or ICE may subpoena Flock directly.

The threat is not hypothetical. Agencies across the country, including many in sanctuary states and cities, have shared data repeatedly with ICE.

With sharing so widespread, it’s just not possible to protect the data — not from misuse by individual officers and not from targeting by federal agencies. If the data is collected, it’s vulnerable to sharing. And the volume of data collected is vast! Almost half a million vehicles have been tracked in Eugene in the past month.

It’s not too surprising that guardrails can’t work here. In today’s day and age, companies like Flock are too nimble and well-resourced (not to mention unscrupulous) to constrain with policy changes here and there. The easiest and most effective solution? Don’t use the tech.

Eugene’s problems are not going to be solved by surveillance. Once you know how the Flock system works, it’s only too apparent that it does more harm than good.