The Battle Brewing: Mass Surveillance Versus the People

A recent announcement by automated license plate reader provider Flock Safety is a harbinger of a larger public debate.

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Commentary

Behind the scenes of breaking news, culture wars, and moral division, a significant battle is brewing: mass surveillance versus the people.

One surveillance technology, in particular, is rising to the surface of the national conversation: automated license plate readers (ALPR).

Flock Safety, a leader in ALPR technology, is one of the companies in the eye of the storm. Last week, Flock’s CEO and co-founder Garrett Langley made headlines when he released a statement announcing that the company was going to “pause” its pilot programs with the U.S. government.

The company stated that while it has no current contracts with any Department of Homeland Security agencies, it did engage in “limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution.”

So why would a company decide not to aid their own government in the fight against human trafficking and fentanyl distribution? Who are the voices that swayed them?

The company’s statement likely stems from criticism (or demonization) of Flock Safety for developing technology that has been adapted for use by ICE agents.

In a July interview with 9News Denver, Flock Safety CEO Langley was asked about the Denver city council voting against extending the city’s Flock contract “out of concerns the system would be exploited for immigration matters.”

Langley straddled the fence: “Every city needs to make a decision [about] what’s right for them. Some cities work really closely with federal authorities. ... Now in the case of Denver, if there’s no desire to work with ICE, that’s great. We need to create a safer city while still upholding the values we have.”

Ultimately, however, Denver Mayor Mike Johnston, a Democrat, extended the contract through October 2025 after the dollar amount was reset to a figure that didn’t need council approval. A spokesman for the mayor said the cameras are “an important tool for fighting crime.”

Meanwhile, Denver city leaders formed a special task force to discuss the technology’s privacy concerns. The policy director for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) of Colorado said he would like the cameras turned off entirely—“until there are policies in place to regulate the use of them.”

Reason magazine claimed that “Flock Safety’s 40,000 cameras present in over 5,000 communities across the U.S. are being used to detain undocumented immigrants, many of whom have no criminal history.”

To be clear, it’s not a matter of Homeland Security or ICE agents directly accessing the Denver system—or any ALPR system. It’s a complex issue of state and local law enforcement agencies sharing information or granting access to other agencies.

Denver7 reported: “Flock Safety’s cameras capture billions of photos of license plates each month. However, it doesn’t own that data. The local agencies in whose jurisdictions the cameras are located do, and they’re the ones who receive inquiries from other law enforcement agencies.”

The same issue has been unfolding in other parts of the country as well.

In 2019, the ACLU of Northern California complained of ICE “using driver location data from local police for deportations.” The company at the center of that controversy was Vigilant Solutions. Now a subsidiary of Motorola Solutions, it too provides license plate recognition technology and intelligence platforms for law enforcement and commercial applications.

As a matter of fact, there are tons of companies clamoring to be No. 1 in the ALPR industry. Genetec’s AutoVu, PlateSmart Technologies, and Rank One Computing are just a few.

Beyond the field of computer science known as computer vision that encompasses license plate recognition, there also lies the lucrative field of biometrics: the physical field of analyzing body traits and the behavioral field that analyzes patterns. In short, there’s a virtual feeding frenzy happening in the marketplace of digital panopticons. (For a great commentary on Bentham’s panopticon—the prison designed for total surveillance—and the modern era, see “The Age of the Digital Panopticon” on the Neuroscience ABS blog.)

But before we balk at having our license plates zapped into a searchable database, let’s consider the advantages.

Local TV station Denver7 reported that Flock Safety cameras “led to 353 arrests, 251 recovered stolen vehicles and 39 recovered firearms as of August 12.”

Cities like Dallas and Fort Worth, Texas, began installing Flock Safety cameras years ago, and law enforcement reports that the cameras have made a difference in fighting crime. Fort Worth authorities say the cameras have helped with gun detection, while Dallas police note their use in real-time crime fighting by sending license plate images to the Dallas Fusion Center. (For those not in the know, there are at least 79 fusion centers across the United States, run by state and local law enforcement in collaboration with the Department of Homeland Security. These centers act as hubs for collecting, evaluating, and sharing intelligence and public safety data.)

Additionally, Flock Safety markets its ALPR technology, as well as its gunfire locator systems, far beyond law enforcement and city management: Companies like Lowe’s and Home Depot use them. They also sell to neighborhood associations (HOAs), schools, and private individuals. Think of their advantages in emergencies like school or church shootings or Amber alerts. ALPR technology seems to be making us all safer.

Yet as with most of the surveillance technology that we’ve reluctantly embraced “for our own good”—especially after the attacks of 9/11—Americans are having second thoughts about the privacy they’re being asked to forfeit in the name of safety.

The movement against license plate readers is making strange bedfellows: Some conservatives criticize it as government overreach, seeing it as a digital dragnet that tracks all vehicles without probable cause—directly infringing on Fourth-Amendment protections against unreasonable searches. Simultaneously, some progressives are also focusing on it as a violation of civil liberties, alleging that it’s being used to target “undocumented migrants.”

Flock Safety’s recent announcement is the first sign that a company providing this kind of surveillance can be swayed by public opinion. It is a clear harbinger of a larger public debate that will likely drive new legislation at the local, state, and possibly even the federal level. It’s a conversation that is long overdue.

Views expressed in this article are opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.