The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of Americans\u2019 comings and goings into a private national database that it makes available to police officers around the country. The system allows police to search the nationwide movement records of any vehicle that comes to their attention. That\u2019s bad enough on its own, but the company is also now apparently analyzing our driving patterns to determine if we\u2019re \u201csuspicious.\u201d That means if your police start using Flock, they could target you just because some algorithm has decided your movement patterns suggest criminality.<\/p>\n
There has been a lot of reporting lately about Flock but I haven\u2019t seen anyone focus on this feature. It\u2019s a significant expansion in the use of the company\u2019s surveillance infrastructure \u2014 from allowing police to find out more about specific vehicles of interest, to using the system to generate suspicion in the first place. The company\u2019s cameras are no longer just recording our comings and goings \u2014 now, using AI in ways we have long warned against<\/a>, the system is actively evaluating each of us to make a decision about whether we should be reported to law enforcement as potential participants in organized crime.<\/p>\n In a February 13 press<\/a> release<\/a> touting an \u201cExpansive AI and Data Analysis Toolset for Law Enforcement,\u201d the company announced several new capabilities, including something called \u201cMulti-State Insights\u201d:<\/p>\n Many large-scale criminal activities\u2014such as human and narcotics trafficking and Organized Retail Crime (ORC)\u2014involve movement across state lines. With our new Multi-State Insights feature, law enforcement is alerted when suspect vehicles have been detected in multiple states, helping investigators uncover networks and trends linked to major crime organizations.<\/p>\n Flock appears to offer this capability through a larger \u201cInvestigations Manager<\/a>,\u201d which urges police departments to \u201cMaximize your LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.\u201d The company also offers a \u201cLinked Vehicles\u201d or \u201cConvoy Search\u201d allowing police to \u201cuncover vehicles frequently seen together,\u201d putting it squarely in the business of tracking people\u2019s associations, and a \u201cMultiple locations search,\u201d which promises to \u201cUncover vehicles seen in multiple locations.\u201d All these are variants on the same theme: using the camera network not just to investigate based on suspicion, but to generate suspicion itself.<\/p>\n In a democracy, the government shouldn\u2019t be watching its citizens all the time just in case we do something wrong. It\u2019s one thing if a police officer out on a street sees something suspicious in public and reacts. But this is an entirely different matter.<\/p>\n First, the police should not be collecting and storing data on people\u2019s movements and travel across space and time in the first place, or contracting to use a private company\u2019s technology to accomplish the same thing. Second, they shouldn\u2019t be taking that data and running it through AI algorithms to potentially swing the government\u2019s eye of suspicion toward random, innocent civilians whose travel patterns just happen to fit what that algorithm thinks is worth bringing to the attention of the police.<\/p>\n And of course because Flock is a private company not subject to checks and balances such as open records laws and oversight by elected officials, we know nothing about the nature of the algorithm or algorithms that it uses\u2014 what logic it may be based upon, the data upon which it was trained, or the frequency and nature of its error rates. Does anyone actually know whether there are movement patterns characteristic of criminal behavior that won\u2019t sweep in vastly larger numbers of innocent people?<\/p>\n We also don\u2019t know what kind of biases the company\u2019s algorithms might exhibit; it\u2019s very easy to imagine an algorithm trained on past criminal histories in which low-income neighborhoods and communities of color are highly over-represented because of the well-established, top-to-bottom biases in our criminal justice system. That could mean that just living in such a neighborhood could make you inherently suspicious in the eyes of this system in a way that someone living in a wealthier place would never be. Among other problems, that\u2019s just plain unfair.<\/p>\n The bottom line is that Flock, having built its giant surveillance infrastructure, is now expanding its uses \u2014 validating all our warnings about how such systems inevitably undergo mission creep, and providing all the more reason why communities should refuse<\/a> to allow the police departments that serve them to participate in this mass surveillance system.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The police surveillance company Flock has built an enormous nationwide license plate tracking system, which streams records of…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":68432,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[45],"tags":[182,181,507,74],"class_list":["post-68431","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68431","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=68431"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/68431\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/68432"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=68431"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=68431"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=68431"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}