I want to address two recent letters to the editor that endorsed the use of the AI-powered Flock Safety surveillance dragnet technology in Eugene and Springfield.

Ted Coopman wrote that “we all volunteered for the privacy panopticon in the name of convenience and entertainment.” The sentiment of his statement being, “I’ve decided to accept it, and you should too!”

No, “we” didn’t “all volunteer” to live in a panopticon. That said, it is a matter of personal consent whether you sign up for Amazon Prime, buy a Google Pixel phone or give an app permission to know your location.

The Flock dragnet uses networked surveillance devices as sensors for a vast central database, which can be used to track a person’s individual movements from any contracted police department with an officer motivated enough to bypass the easily surmounted privacy limitations. Federal agents and police officers alike have already been caught abusing the system in acts of persecution (ICE agents searching for immigrants, and a woman who was stalked by an officer in Texas because she had an abortion).

The real-world misapplications of Flock’s searchable national database contradict Larry Bently’s assertion that only criminals need to be concerned about their privacy with the system. Furthermore, Flock’s own product descriptions contradict his notion that these devices are anything like a simple speed camera or a tollbooth camera.

Coopman’s notion that Flock cameras can “solve crimes that disproportionately impact vulnerable communities, make for safer neighborhoods and extend the city’s limited policing resources” are unsubstantiated claims, using language paraphrased from the Flock sales materials that I have been scrutinizing for months.

Meanwhile, a 2022 ACLU white paper directly contradicts the author, indicating that AI-powered, centralized, networked surveillance can “disproportionately harm historically disadvantaged communities.”

It is personally aggravating to have spent months hearing the same uninformed rhetoric being redeployed by a small-but-vocal subset of men who refuse to do any research on this.

Geoffrey Gordon
Eugene