\u201cI am concerned.\u201d \u201cA breach of trust.\u201d<\/p>\n
This is what we heard from San Jose councilmembers at the recent Rules Committee hearing on the misuse of the city\u2019s Flock license plate reader system<\/a>. These are appropriate words. But concern is not enough.<\/p>\n A San Jose police officer used the department\u2019s Flock system<\/a> to share a woman\u2019s location with his cousin who was accused of abusing her.<\/p>\n Imagine for a moment how this woman must have felt. She had done precisely what victims of domestic violence are told to do: She sought help. She trusted the institutions of her city when she told them that she was afraid of someone. And the city\u2019s surveillance infrastructure allegedly helped that person find her. What could be a more literal breach of trust?<\/p>\n Of course, the individual responsible should be punished and the rules should be tightened. Yet this is not a problem with an individual, the problem is systemic. It was predictable. It was predicted. So while what happened in San Jose is shocking, it is not surprising.<\/p>\n The people most vulnerable to surveillance are simply the first to feel what it enables: domestic-violence survivors (officers have used Flock to stalk ex-partners and romantic interests across the U.S.<\/a>); immigrants (police searches have exposed Connecticut Flock data to immigration enforcement<\/a>); and protesters (California agencies have searched Orange County\u2019s Flock system<\/a> for anti-ICE protesters).<\/p>\n \u201cThese are just bad apples, isolated cases\u201d we hear from Flock defenders. But time and time again, these \u201cexceptions\u201d follow from a basic property of surveillance infrastructure: Once information is collected, its use expands beyond the original reason given for collecting it.<\/p>\n If you build a tool which takes a picture to answer \u201cWhere was the suspect\u2019s car?\u201d it\u2019s not hard to then make it answer \u201cWhere\u00a0was\u00a0my ex?\u201d\u00a0or \u201cWhere\u00a0was\u00a0this immigrant?\u201d\u00a0or \u201cWho came to this mosque?\u201d<\/p>\n You cannot prevent surveillance creep through better guardrails. Mountain View learned that this year<\/a>. Despite supposedly strict policies requiring the city to approve agencies individually, more than 250 unapproved agencies conducted roughly 600,000 searches of its Flock data<\/a> in a single year.<\/p>\n Stop telling us that one more layer of guardrails will make mass surveillance safe. The failure is built into the system itself.<\/p>\n