Flock surveillance cameras are blanketing the country, and to no one’s surprise, innocent people are being caught in their dragnet.
At our sister publication The Drive, automotive journalist Joel Feder reports how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. The police used four squad cars to box him in in a coordinated maneuver; when he demanded an explanation, the officers said that they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had tagged his car as stolen — erroneously, as it turned out.
It was a startling example of how far reaching the controversial surveillance system had already become, never mind how flawed its conclusions can be.
“Whether you’ve actually stolen a car or are just rolling down the road having done nothing wrong, like me, once these systems have you in their crosshairs, there’s pretty much only one way it can go,” Feder wrote. “Welcome to the future. It’s scary out here.”
While still on the scene — every on-the-run criminal’s favorite place to lie low, a Kohl’s parking lot — the cops explained that the license plates on Feder’s Range Rover had been reported stolen by a dealership in Los Angeles. This made “absolutely no sense” to Feder, since car companies are extremely thorough about who in the media they loan their cars to. One officer presented photos taken by the cameras in the Flock app showing his SUV, plate number 34 10 DTM, confirming they had the right car — at least according to Flock.
But when Feder got Jaguar Land Rover on the phone, the automaker said that the reported plate number was 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. On New Jersey plates, the middle number is written smaller than the others, and for whatever reason, the number entered into the Flock system was recorded as 34 DTM.
This apparently drove Flock’s AI tech haywire, according to Feder. It “wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town,” he wrote. “It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.”
Because Flock’s surveillance network is so sprawling, this error was now a nationwide issue. “Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock,” Feder wrote, “any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen.” Later, Feder discovered that the car they were looking for wasn’t stolen after all; its license plate had been accidentally misplaced during a photo shoot.
Flock has surged to national attention in the past year, as police departments across the country partner with the firm to deploy its license plate readers and video cameras that can track vehicles and pedestrians. Often taking the form of towering pylons, it’s as if Flock wants residents to know they’re being watched, and its highly visible presence has served as a lightning rod for anxieties over privacy, surveillance, and police overreach.
Residents have fiercely protested against the deployment of Flock cameras, overrunning town meetings. Others have resorted to covering the cameras with trash bags or vandalizing them. Last month, a US Air Force engineer won public sympathy after being charged with sawing down over a dozen Flock cameras, with his legal defense’s GoFundMe page quickly raising tens of thousands of dollars.
On top of being widespread, Flock cameras are hooked into a centralized network, meaning the troves of footage they collect can easily be accessed by cops with little oversight. Flock and police departments argue that the cameras will only be used to investigate serious crimes, but there’re already mounting cases of cops being arrested for using Flock to stalk women. An investigation last year revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock’s network to conduct searches.
Flock’s overreach is already so vast that, in Feder’s case, he was warned to drive straight home and not cross into the neighboring towns — where their own Flock cameras would wrongly flag his car and sic the cops on him, too.
“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth,” the officer who warned him said. “If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”
More on surveillance: Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning