Flock Cameras
- Alex Vezina
- 19 hours ago
- 9 min read
As a follow-up to the video and article we did on passenger vehicle monitoring and data collection, we were asked about the Flock camera situation.
This is the situation in the United States where over 120,000 surveillance cameras have been installed and linked to create a sophisticated surveillance network. The constitutionality of this has been questioned, people are destroying the cameras, and it is a great example of one of our previously explored themes: ‘safety versus freedom’.
What are Flock Cameras?
The manufacturer of these cameras is a company called Flock Safety, hence ‘Flock camera’.
These specific cameras automatically record:
License plate numbers
Vehicle make, model, and color
Time and location
Distinct features like bumper stickers or roof racks (Inconsistent)
The cameras are installed by police departments, homeowners’ associations, schools, businesses, and municipalities. In addition to the individual cameras, Flock Safety connects thousands of cameras into a searchable nationwide network, allowing investigators to reconstruct where a vehicle has traveled over days or weeks.
These cameras generally take ‘snapshots’ when a vehicle passes in front of them, they are not supplying a continuous constant feed (like a CCTV system)
Generally, they answer the sort of question like:
"Who drove past this intersection at 3:37 PM?"
But they are not optimized to answer:
"Show me everything that happened on this street between 2:00 and 4:00 PM."
What is the main controversy?
In summary:
The controversy centers on whether Flock Safety's automated license plate reader (ALPR) network transforms ordinary observation on public roads into a form of mass surveillance that the Fourth Amendment should regulate.
The fourth amendment:
Protects people from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government
Requires warrants to be based on probable cause and
Requires these warrants to specifically describe the place and items involved
The Canadian equivalent of this is Section 8 of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms. There are some significant practical differences between them, they are not identical.
To break the specific argument down, courts in the USA have generally held that:
Police may observe what is visible from public roads.
Seeing a car on a street is not a "search."
The contentious question becomes whether or not continuous automated tracking is fundamentally different from an officer seeing one’s car once.
Further, it is now generally understood that long-term location histories can reveal intimate details about a person’s life. This included a supreme court ruling decision that a dragnet search using Google’s location history data was covered by the Fourth Amendment, thus making it unreasonable.
Flock argues that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in licence plates displayed on public roads and that the system simply automates what any officer could observe.
Critics argue that one officer is not the same as 2,000 cameras and that the original laws protecting privacy did not consider this degree of automated large-scale surveillance being possible.
This issue is currently being debated in the both the public discourse and the courts. As of yet it is unresolved.
Further Detail on the Controversy (Mosaic Theory)
This section is for those that are unfamiliar with dragnet searches and some of the other nuanced specifics surrounding this debate. Much of this is currently encapsulated in ‘Mosaic Theory’.
Mosaic Theory
The idea is that a single camera is technologically similar to an officer observing on the street.
Important distinction, this single camera is: focused, brief, and difficult to scale.
With 10,000+ cameras in a network with a database record, this changes things, enter Mosaic Theory.
Suppose an officer knows that an individual:
Visited a mall one time.
Went to a particular church one time.
Was nearby a particular doctor’s office one time.
Went to a particular political meeting one time.
Especially if each observation is dependent and not connected, very little is actually known from this. Some things can be inferred but there is a lot of uncertainty.
Instead, consider an officer has detailed information on every time someone was on a road for the entire year, every trip, every time they leave their house. Instead they could infer:
Medical conditions and history, friendships, romantic relationships, work schedule, vacation time and activity, religion, political beliefs, habits, daily routine, and more.
The argument is that this creates a ‘mosaic’ that is substantially different than any individual observation. It then leads to the underlying argument that police should not have access to this level of information without a warrant, hence Fourth Amendment issue.
Dragnet Surveillance
A dragnet is a giant fishing net that catches everything. Applied in this context, it usually applies to when a police agency requests information about everyone in case it becomes useful later.
Imagine there is a shooting in a mall and the police request Google to supply them with device information of everyone in their database within 500 meters of the mall.
Here is why this becomes controversial. A traditional investigation has this sort of process chart:
Crime 🡪 Suspect 🡪 Warrant satisfied by probable cause 🡪 Evidence
A dragnet system works more like this:
Evidence 🡪 Crime 🡪 Suspect
Consider, it is generally agreed that police cannot search everyone’s house because one person committed a crime.
The argument is that a dragnet is in-effect doing just this, or potentially searching everyone’s house before a crime is even committed.
Essentially it is argued that dragnets are a workaround for probable cause, and that police should not have a workaround for probable cause.
Supporters will argue that recording a licence plate does not constitute a search, so dragnet systems do not require probable cause. Probable cause is not being worked around if it is not required.
The counterargument to this is that a Flock camera database is functionally equivalent to police physically tailing every driver in the city for a year and keeping notebooks recording every destination. If this was actually being done by physical officers, the public would likely find that outrageous.
A note on Canada
Section 8 of the Charter has a particularly relevant section that is substantially different from the Fourth Amendment United States counterpart.
The concept of a “biographical core” protects information that reveals intimate details.
In Canada, it is less about ‘where’ information was collected and more about ‘what the information reveals when assembled’. There are also several Supreme Court of Canada decisions which inform on Canada’s approach to informational privacy.
Of three related cases: R. v. Spencer, R. v. Marakah, R v. Reeves.
The first one (R. v. Spencer) is particularly relevant. After R. v. Spencer, police generally need judicial oversight in order to get subscriber information from an internet service provider when they identify an IP doing suspicious or potentially criminal activity.
An IP address by itself is not a very revealing data point, but when combined with other data points allows police or the government to learn a lot about a person. This is the “what the information reveals” part of privacy that Section 8 is meant to protect.
The Resiliency Lens
When looking at anything like this through a public safety, disaster risk reduction, emergency management, or one of the other relevant lenses we lend our expertise to there is a general way to structure any issue like this.
For brevity we have simplified things into a freedom versus safety lens, but technically that is only done after some initial refinement and scoping.
To show the process from start to finish, first we look at any policy or risk control and apply the following categories or questions:
Public safety benefit or cost. Does this help or harm public safety?
Individual liberty / privacy. Does this increase or decrease?
Accountability (usually government). How is this handled? What is the risk of misuse?
Equity. Is there even cost and benefit or is one group benefitted at the expense of another?
Cost. What is the resource cost to implement (time, money, operational, etc.)?
Effectiveness. Does it work? What is the technological readiness?
With most things, effectiveness and cost are looked at first. If these are impractical, then the policy or risk control fails regardless.
For Flock cameras, cost and effectiveness goals are met. They are inexpensive for what they do and they are very effective at their intended purpose.
For most (not all) public safety policies, equity will not be a significant concern. This is usually explored very early and if a relevant issue here is identified it often needs to be considered for the rest of the process.
On equity, the goal is to surveil the entire population within the context of road safety, there is no immediately apparent equity issue.
Accountability and individual liberty become closely related in this case, both can be grouped together in the broader concept of ‘freedom’ as a cost.
Public safety is benefitted as this is a useful police resource. If the surveillance technology was not a net benefit to public safety there would be no reasonable debate on the issue.
In this case for simplicity, the trade-off can be loosely understood as safety versus freedom.
Now freedom can mean different things to different people. Often this falls into a few broad categories like:
Constitutional rights, privacy, freedom from government monitoring, autonomy or freedom of movement.
In this case, this issue actually intersects with all of the above:
Constitutional rights, privacy, and government monitoring should be obvious.
For autonomy and freedom of movement: People may alter their behaviour because they know or believe they are being tracked. In social science this is known as a “chilling effect”. The fear of surveillance results in restricted movement.
The Pros and Cons
Flock cameras tend to neatly fall into a pro versus con framework where there are public safety pros and freedom related cons.
Public Safety Pros:
Improves Crime Solving – Rapidly identifying and tracking vehicles is significantly improved. This assists with homicides, Amber Alerts, robberies, hit-and-runs, etc.
Force Multiplication – The camera network can monitor more roadways than physical officers practically can.
Crime Deterrence – Some people won’t commit a crime they otherwise would if they know or suspect they are being watched.
Officer Safety – Patrol officers can be alerted about stolen vehicles or violent offenders before the initial encounter, better preparing them for what would have been a more unknown situation.
More Objective Evidence – Camera records can corroborate or refute witness statements. This may also exonerate innocent people.
Less Intrusive in some cases – Some situations otherwise require the stoppage of large numbers of vehicles like checkpoints and roadblocks. This creates an alternative in some situations so innocent motorists do not need to be inconvenienced.
Inter-agency Cooperation – It is easier for different jurisdictions to coordinate when suspects move from one to another. The data is set up to be shared if the police force wants to share it with another police force.
Freedom Adjacent Cons:
Mass Location Records: The movements of law-abiding citizens who are not suspected of any crime are recorded and stored.
Expanded Surveillance: The government can monitor movement at a previously impossible scale.
Chilling Effect: Even lawful activities may be avoided out of fear of surveillance.
Mission Creep (slippery slope): Once the technology exists, it may be utilized for progressively less severe crimes until it is used for things that were not originally intended. ‘Pandoras box’ being opened.
Misuse: Once the resource exists, there is potential that it could be used for a variety of improper reasons. Personal vendetta, targeting political enemies, etc.
Difficult to go back: Once the database has been created it is difficult to opt-out or to delete old records. Further, it is difficult to reverse course once the cost has been spent to implement. Governments also generally do not like giving up new powers the people allow them to have.
Normalization (slippery slope 2): Eventually the routine monitoring becomes accepted infrastructure. This will likely result in further expansion and less public scrutiny.
Discussion
As with many of the other topics covered recently, this is another situation that comes down to the public’s priorities.
Unlike some of the other topics like consumer protections (the Sony controversy), this is not the sort of issue where one side is concerned about individuals’ rights and the other is generally ambivalent. In this case, both sides have regular citizens that have valid reasons to side one way or the other.
One family may have immigrated to the United States from a country where government surveillance presented a clear threat to their safety.
Another family may have had a child abducted and wished the police were better resourced to track the kidnapper’s vehicle.
Exigent circumstances further complicate this issue. Exigent circumstances broadly refer to situations where public safety is imminently threatened or evidence is about to be destroyed. Judicial oversight is not initially required in exigent circumstances because the idea is that it is an emergency and it would take too long.
An argument could be made that the cameras could be installed, the database constructed, and the search restricted by judicial oversight or exigent circumstances. For many this would resolve the privacy concern.
For others, the creation of the database at all represents too great a government accountability risk, making this unacceptable. This perspective would also argue issues with the risk of mission creep.
If there is any country in the world that would err on the side of freedom at the expense of public safety in a 50/50 coinflip it would likely be the USA. That is not to say this situation is a 50/50 coinflip, but it does speak to the USA’s predisposition.
Other countries that already have extensive CCTV camera use would likely view this differently.
In the event America goes the route of general acceptance and expansion of Flock cameras and their associating systems, that would certainly be interesting. This would include their courts determining that these systems are legal and there are no Fourth Amendment concerns.
Such a conclusion might lead one to wonder what the future might hold for their Second Amendment and public safety surrounding firearms. But that is a freedom versus public safety debate for another time.
Learn more and watch the associated video here.
Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and is the author of Continuity 101. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca.
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