ACLU of Massachusetts Releases New Toolkit to Help People Challenge Flock Cameras in Their Communities

Source: American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has released a new community advocacy toolkit to help people across the Commonwealth challenge the use of Flock and other automated license plate readers (LPR) by their local police departments. 

The toolkit contributes to ACLU’s Get The Flock Out Campaign, a national effort to help communities stop local Flock surveillance.

See related: ‘Get the Flock Out’: Nationwide Backlash Grows Against AI-Powered Surveillance Tech (Common Dreams)

The toolkit includes templates for public records requests to help residents find out whether and how their local police department is using LPRs and a model ordinance designed to expand community oversight of surveillance technology, including LPRs. It also includes sample emails and a conversation guide for residents who want to share their concerns with neighbors or elected officials.

At least 80 Massachusetts police departments, including the Amherst Police Department, have entered into contracts with Flock Safety, a private company that operates nearly 90,000 LPR cameras across the country. Other law enforcement agencies, including the Massachusetts State Police, contract with Vigilant Solutions, another major LPR vendor. Citing privacy and safety concerns with this technology, communities across the country have successfully advocated for their local governments to drop Flock or stop sharing collected plate data with police nationwide.

Flock’s ALPR cameras aren’t like your normal traffic cameras. This surveillance technology records and tracks every car that comes into view, and then an AI algorithm catalogs the make, model, color, license plate number, bumper stickers, and even scratches. This personal information is then uploaded into a nationwide database that any law enforcement agency with a Flock contract can search — with few regulations or oversight on how they use what they find.

“License plate readers pose unacceptable risks to our collective privacy and safety, and it’s been immensely gratifying to see so many communities fighting for — and achieving — democratic oversight over this technology,” said Kade Crockford, director of technology and justice programs at the ACLU of Massachusetts. “Building on the incredible work we’ve seen in places like Framingham, Brookline, and Cambridge, our new toolkit is designed to inform, inspire, and empower anyone in Massachusetts who wants to protect motorist privacy in their community.”

ACLU notes that we’ve already seen how this mass surveillance tool can be weaponized and abused by law enforcement. ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock to go after immigrants without warrants. Kansas police used them to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen.

Brett Wilkins, writing in Common Dreams, points out that the uses of Flock cameras are expansive and include, spying on constitutionally protected protest activity and enforcing abortion bans by tracking pregnant people’s travel across states—even ones in which the medical procedure is legal.

The new ACLU of Massachusetts toolkit also offers helpful background information about LPRs. It highlights the risks that LPR technology poses to all drivers, as well as the particular dangers to vulnerable groups like immigrants, healthcare patients and providers, survivors of stalking and domestic abuse, political protesters, and religious minorities. The toolkit offers a detailed but accessible account of the key problems with LPR systems, like data-sharing and data ownership. At worst, LPR programs facilitate information sharing with federal agencies and police departments in other states, enabling these out of state and federal officials to freely track drivers in Massachusetts without meaningful safeguards, exposing Bay Staters to harassment and threats from hostile actors and rogue agencies like U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.