How to Fight Deployment of Flock and Other Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers in Your Community

Americans across the country have objected the privacy invasion of the infamous mass surveillance company Flock Safety as a nationwide movement has emerged to oppose local partnerships with Flock.

Advocates and local officials from across the political spectrum have helped push cities across the U.S. to terminate their contracts with the company. Many recoiled learning that the company was sharing local automated license plate reader (ALPR) data with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to assist with deportation efforts. One Texas sheriff even used that data to track down a woman who’d had an abortion. A federal law enforcement agency also used the readers to identify attendees at a gun show.

More than 55 localities have ended contracts with Flock in the past year alone. If your city or town is already doing ALPR business with Flock or one of its competitors, Axon or Motorola Solutions, we encourage you to join this movement to terminate your local government’s relationship with the company. And if police or government leaders are currently pushing for a mass-surveillance ALPR system in your community, we urge you to oppose it.

In some cities, opponents of ALPRs have had a difficult time winning an outright rejection of this technology. We offer a suite of options below for limiting the dangers and damage of such a system. If you live in a community where ALPR systems can’t be stopped entirely, you can still help protect your neighborhood’s civil liberties. We recommend working with your local police department and elected officials to ensure that local ALPR cameras do not feed into a mass surveillance system that lets potentially every law enforcement department in the world spy on any city in the U.S.

Flock says its corporate objective is to build a national camera network of ALPRs by placing them in every city in the United States. While license plate readers have been around for some time, Flock and its venture capital investors are pursuing massive profits by increasing the government’s ability to identify and track vehicles and drivers in local communities to dystopian levels. As Flock itself boasts, its nationwide ALPR network produces more than 20 billion vehicle-tracking plate scans every month in more than 5,000 American communities.

Flock not only allows private camera owners to create their own “hot lists” that will generate alarms when listed plates are spotted, it also runs all plates against larger state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Flock works with police departments, neighborhood watch groups, and other private customers.

Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation. It then makes that data available for any of its law enforcement customers. A current Flock law enforcement customer can also run a search on behalf of other agencies, like ICE. This provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool. Big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments can also access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns. Both Axon and Motorola Solutions, who are competitors to Flock, are pursuing similar business models.

Many police departments neither understand nor endorse Flock mass surveillance-driven approach but are using the company’s cameras simply because other police departments in their region are doing so. For example, the police department in Syracuse inadvertently shared its local ALPR data via Flock’s nationwide system, allowing their data to be searched 4.4 million times in a single year. Syracuse cancelled its Flock contract once this information came to light. Syracuse’s story is not an outlier, it has happened to police departments nationwide. Your own police department may also be amenable to compromise. That might include using a vendor that does not tie its cameras into a mass-surveillance system. In other cases, you may be able to get your police department or local legislators to add provisions to Flock’s standard contract that limit its mass surveillance and data sharing capabilities.

If your city or state insists on using ALPRs, the ACLU has model bills you can ask your state and local legislators to adopt to ensure guardrails for critical civil rights and liberties are put into law before ALPRs are placed in the field. You can do this by urging your state and local representatives to adopt our recommendations, attending public meetings and hearings, and raising awareness by writing letters to the editor and op-eds. You can also use social media to highlight the issues. Be sure to tag your elected officials with #GetTheFlockOut.

The three most important areas for regulation and negotiation are how long the ALPR data is retained, who the ALPR data is shared with, and how ALPRs and their data are used by law enforcement. We obtained samples of Flock’s Government Agency Customer Agreements with the Greensboro, North Carolina Police Department and other Flock contracts with local police. Below is suggested contract language across these three areas, based on these agreements, that you can use in your local advocacy efforts.

Whether ALPRs are being used for Amber Alerts, toll collection, or to identify stolen vehicles, agencies can run a license plate against a watchlist in seconds. The police do not need records of every person’s comings and goings, including trips to doctor’s offices, religious institutions, and political gatherings.

New Hampshire state law is a good model. It requires law enforcement to delete license plate data that is not connected to a crime within three minutes. But you should get the shortest retention period you can in your community. From worst to best, here are three approaches that can be taken to the retention of ALPR data: