Tim’s Comment:
With the introduction of new technology, new issues arise.
Some of these cases raise old issues (like privacy) in new forms.
In this section of the video, “Institute for Justice” lawyers and commentators describe how Flock raises new issues of Privacy, Abuse, and Errors.
Did you know that in some states more than one vehicle can be issued with the same license plate number because a specialty plate for a university (alumni plate?) can have the same number as a specialty fire plate? As information starts to be used in new ways, we become increasingly aware of the flaws in the ways we use it and the opportunities for abuse.
One of the main solutions proposed is a requirement that the police obtain a warrant from a judge.
Transcript:
FLOCK Abuse
Well, going back to the abuse point, I know we’ve collected now almost 300 instances of abuse in just the time that we’ve been trying to monitor this. What has both stood out to you as maybe the worst case or one of the worst cases of abuse you’ve come across just through our own research?
Um, one that sticks out to me was um, one that was just recently uncovered in I think Krebc, Illinois, where a police chief, he not only stalked his ex-wife with the flat cameras, but he also enlisted two of his um, two of his deputies to do the same. And so it was three officers all kind of tracking and stalking this woman and she was eventually able to get restraining orders on all three of them and they all three resigned. But it’s you know it’s that kind of thing and it I will say in general the thing that stands out to me is that it’s not like somebody in many of these cases I would even say most of them it’s not like somebody just checking somebody’s license plates once or twice a day. You see them checking it hundreds thousands of times over weeks.
It’s just really obsessive and and really scary behavior.
Error Correction?
And the story that sticks out to me is the story of Lindsay Issacs, who lives in Florida. Um, police showed up to her house and accused her of a triple vehicular homicide because a black Durango or no correction, a maroon Durango had been spotted at the scene of an accident.
She has a black Durango. Instead of confirming the color differences and noting that her car had no damage, whereas the car that caused the vehicular homicide had a bunch of damage, they arrested her and she spent 13 days in jail for a triple homicide that she had nothing to do with. She was miles away. If they even just looked at the flock camera data a little closer, they would have realized she was miles away at the time of the accident. There was no way she could be involved in causing this crash. and she spent 13 days in jail for a crime she had nothing to do with.
Stories like that are the craziest to me because it seems like the best argument for these ALPR systems is actually that it would be easier to find the person that caused this accident, right? Like it’s weird to me that all they know is Maroon Durango when it seems like they should be able to know this license plate and whatever and they should have be able been able to trace that car. And so how that got sort of shifted into this other person’s car without like it it doesn’t make any sense to me that this didn’t actually help them find the right person instead. Like I don’t understand what fell apart there.
Yeah. What happened there was a witness of the crash gave a partial license plate. So the the cops had partial license plate uh maroon Durango. They looked it up.
a different license plate and a black Durango was good enough for them. And it it’s just it’s kind of sloppy, shoddy police work. And it gets back to the point that allowing these cameras to be used without a warrant when we’re relying on partial license plate numbers, that’s even creepier and worse than, you know, a routine search where you’ve got the full license plate.
Yeah. Do you ever get people arguing?
I’m not saying that I believe this because I I don’t. But just hypothetically, what if there were just more cameras, right? Like if there were, you know, many more cameras, would that prevent some of these mistakes? Because then there wouldn’t be these sort of problems of, oh, it’s just a partial license plate. It’s just a whatever. Like there’s a camera on every single, you know, inch of the road, and so it would be impossible for something to happen without you knowing about it.
ERRORS: Fixed by Warrants?
The issue is that the AI is still going to occasionally misread things. It’ll misread a zero as an O and all of a sudden you’re pulling somebody over uh who has a similar license plate but not the exact same even if you have cameras everywhere and you have a full license plate number that you’re looking for.
This AI system makes a lot of mistakes and even a small percentage when you have that many cameras results in a lot of incidents of mistaken uh you know pulling people over on a mistake.
I’m glad you brought up the AI part of it because one of the things that I’ve always wondered as we’ve, you know, been talking about our our work in this space is, you know, we have these retention policies of 30 days or 12 days or or whatever, but if it’s all going through an AI and the AI is learning sort of like the pattern of your movements from all of this stuff, what is being retained? Is it just sort of the initial photographs, but then sort of the like memory of that and the learning of that still lives in the AI? Like is anything ever actually deleted then? Do we know? I don’t have to ask you that if we don’t know the answer to that question. That’s bothered me every day though.
No, my understanding is that it just retains like the individual captures, right? and you’ve got you’ve got like basically on the back end you’ve got a like an Excel file of all these individual captures and you can pull them out and say I want all the captures of this license plate and then with that data you can do a lot of different things. You can create the heat maps of where they’ve been and that kind of thing. So my understanding it’s just the individual captures but it’s you know with that data you can do many things and then the AI can do many things with that. In addition to the heat map, it can also identify vehicles that you are frequently seen traveling with. So say, you know, you and your you and your mother are going to, I don’t know, doctor’s appointments together and your mother’s driving, you’re driving separately. They can say that, oh, we frequently spot these two cars together going to and from this location.
Or maybe me and a money launderer go to Target at the same day every week or something.
Error Compensation
Yeah, the I just you know on the question of errors, one of the interesting things we’ve seen multiple times is police officers entering enter entering multiple variations of the same license plate into the system to account for the errors. So they will enter the same license plate with a one and then with an L and they will say, you know, oh this is cuz the system make errors. But that that basically guarantees that you have some innocent person if they’ve got that license plate that they’re going to get pulled over. And we’ve seen that quite a bit in Colorado where they had a bunch of those cases. Oklahoma they have an issue with that as well. Um because Oklahoma has a weird thing where you can actually get duplicate multiple cars can have the same license plate because Oklahoma has a lot of specialty plates and so like the University of Oklahoma plate and then like the firefighters plate and whatever each one of those plates they can all have the exact same number.
Oh wow.
Yeah. It’s a huge problem.
It seems like a problem regardless.
It’s yeah, they they are fixing that. The state of Oklahoma is fixing that, but based on what we’re understanding, what we’re seeing come out of the state is that there hasn’t been much effort to accommodate that on the flock and ALPR side. And so we’re seeing people with these multiple plates or these duplicate plates just getting pulled over for no reason.
And Kansas has the same issue. and an innocent man and his family were pulled over and and held on the side of the road because uh their Kansas State University license plate number matched a fire department license plate number and the flock said, “Okay, we’re not accounting for the the KSU versus the fire fighter part. We’re just looking at the number. This is the car you’re looking for. Pull it over.”
Wow.
Two Categories: Stalking and Errors
Wow. So it sounds like really there there are are two kind of categories of issues here. You have the one category being the intentional abuse, the stalking and then the other category being just the errors and the mistakes or and and that could be human implementation. It could be, you know, the way that the system is designed. But they they both all, at least in my mind, they they they both have the same fix, which is, you know, having an independent check. Uh some would call it the warrant requirement. uh where you have to go before a judge and explain your reasoning about why you want to arrest somebody. Uh that would solve at least in my mind 99% of this, wouldn’t it?
Yeah. I mean, the the points that J likes to bring up the most are the warrant requirement is the floor and it’s the most important thing. And beyond that, the the other important things are the retention period because if you have a a retention period of just a few hours, police can still use that to solve a a a break in crime that just happened, right? But it doesn’t allow them to reconstruct somebody’s movements for an entire month in a way that violates the Fourth Amendment.
So, let’s talk about um some of the cases a bit. So, we have the case in San Jose, which you’ve mentioned. Um, so what’s going on in that case right now?
So, we just had uh argument on our motion to dismiss. Um, we’re awaiting a written decision from the judge, but uh at argument, she seemed to uh not be inclined to side with us on this, but that’s all right because we expect losses at the lower courts. And the Ninth Circuit has actually been really good on digital privacy issues. So if if we do get ruled against at the district court level, we’re looking forward to appealing and and our clients are in it for the long haul as are our attorneys.
One of the things and I think that this came up in the argument also, but one of the things that I just hear from, you know, regular people about these cases is that you don’t have a sort of reasonable expectation of privacy in public. And so how does that sort of translate into these cases?
Well, even in our Norfolk case, which we we lost at the district court level and are now appealing, the judge who ruled against us said that there will be a certain threshold of cameras. We’re not going to draw the line. We don’t know what the line is, but there will be a certain threshold of cameras where this is a search that requires a warrant. It’s all about how much of your life uh you can reconstruct with these cameras. So even judges that are ruling against us are acknowledging that at some point this does become a fourth amendment issue and the fourth amendment has something to say about that.
One of the arguments we hear a lot uh from defenders of ALPR technology is well these cameras they’re just taking a snapshot in time, right? It’s not this invasive thing. It’s just a little snapshot. But as we’re seeing in these cities that have this real real uh kind of thick density of these cameras, if you have a lot of cameras, you can really reconstruct a person’s movements.
And I think that the the fact that we’re seeing so many of these stalking cases where you have cops just looking up somebody hundreds of times in a day, that says that these aren’t just snapshots in time that they can use them to pretty much track exactly where they’re going. And we’ve seen plenty of stories of cops showing up at the at the place where an ex is or or showing up at the workplace of somebody that they just met and they decided they, you know, wanted to talk to them more. So the the fact that these cameras are such an effective stalking tool, I think really undercuts the notion that these are just, you know, a snapshot in time and we don’t have to worry about those from a from a Fourth Amendment standpoint.
And the good news is uh it it’s not an case, but a judge in Oklahoma did recently rule that the use of these cameras is a search that requires a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. So you’re starting to see the tide turn in our favor at the courts. It’s already turned in our favor in the court of public opinion, but it’s starting to turn that way in the actual courts as well.
Yeah, the scale of it really seems to me because I mean, if you are, you know, driving down the street, it makes sense that you, you know, would expect that a person could see you and take a picture of your car, but you aren’t expecting that as you drive through a town that there would be 24/7 a police officer on every single street corner taking photographs of every single car. and then like aggregating and processing that information and knowing that you went to the grocery store every Tuesday or or whatever. And so it really does seem like the the scale of it and the interconnectedness of it enters a completely different space. And even if you did have a police officer standing on every corner taking a photo, it still wouldn’t be quite as intrusive as this because it wouldn’t have the smart capabilities and the sharing uh that Flock in particular, certainly other ALPR providers as well, but because Flock is in so many communities, the sharing is really the feature that police are looking for. Um the city of Richmond, Virginia just canceled their flock contract because they said it is becoming less useful because other nearby municipalities had canceled their contract. So that really hammers home the point that police see the sharing ability as the most important value ad for them.
And and there has been some recent movement I know federally with flock cameras and ALPR um technology and I know that was involved in that as well. Could you talk a little bit about the the recent federal Senate hearing on ALPR cameras?
Yeah, we’ve had a rare bipartisan moment on this issue. Um the American public, all of the polling uh shows Flock as a company kind of underwater with Republicans, Democrats, and independents. And it was so much so that uh Senator Josh Holly from Missouri recently had a uh a Senate subcommittee hearing on the issue. and he invited all of the CEOs from Flock and Axon and these different ALPR providers. None of them showed up, but who he also invited uh was, our uh legislative council, Alistister Whitney, testified there, as well as uh Lindseay Issacs, the woman I mentioned earlier, who spent 13 days in jail. Uh we had a sheriff from uh Panol County, Arizona, who recently cancelled his his city’s flock contract uh over privacy concerns. We had a hacker, a self-described hacker who showed the vulnerabilities with the tech side of it and then the ACLU was also there. So, we had this crosspartisan group of people testifying about the concerns. And it’s not very often that you see Josh Holly, Richard Blumenthal, Corey Booker, Katie Britt, all of these people from across the political spectrum who were on that subcommittee were all sharing concerns about how these cameras were ripe for abuse. And I think Lindsay’s story in particular really stuck with them because it it showed that there’s a real life consequence to this. Like if you’re just getting stalked, yes, that’s creepy and bad, but if you don’t know about it, oh well. But if you spend 13 days in jail for it, that I think that shows that this can really really impact people’s lives.
Well, and it’s impacted people’s lives in ways um that we kind of didn’t even anticipate. We have a case out of Texas that was about, you know, pre-textual stops on on the highway. Um, our client Alec shot was pulled over um under kind of completely bogus reasons and held on the roadside for like an hour. They brought out a drug dog. Um, and a lot of, you know, our interest in that case is sort of a that’s how civil forfeite cases start a lot of the times. Um, but then as we were kind of getting into it, we realized that there was an ALPR thing going on there also that was sort of happened even before Alec was pulled over the first time. So, can you explain how ALPR is connected there at all?
Suspicious Driving Patterns?
Yeah, I think this is a great example of how’s media and communications work can help supplement our our uh litigation. We worked with the Associated Press reporter Byron Tao on a story that uncovered that CBP was using these cameras uh to pull people over for quote suspicious driving patterns uh in in the South. And the more we learned, we realized, wait, that is why Alec, our client in this Texas traffic stop case was pulled over, was using ALPRs to flag his driving patterns as suspicious. And as you said, we got a great ruling from a federal uh jury recently that said that was unconstitutional.
And I think that just that that specific case underscores, we’ve been talking primarily about local officials, local police departments, sheriff’s agencies using these cameras. There’s an entire an entirely different universe uh at the federal level that we that’s much more opaque. we have much less uh of a window into what’s going on there, but we know that the federal authorities are very interested in this, particularly uh CBP, DHS. Um, and you know, you have to assume that the same sorts of problems and abuses are happening there, but because it’s so much harder to kind of penetrate what their operations are, it’s just kind of a black box at this point.
So, what have we, you know, I know that we’re talking about the federal side, the local side. Can you talk a little bit about some of the, you know, positive progress that’s happened on the local side and maybe also, you know, if other people are concerned about what’s going on with ALPR’s, you know, what can they do?
Yeah, it’s been a little over a year since J launched our campaign on this issue, the plate privacy project. Uh we launched it in August 2025 and since then um we’ve worked with reporters in 41 states and the District of Columbia to kind of expose this as an issue and and bring it to the limelight and and make it a a major part of the national conversation. Um our our database tracking cities that have canceled their contracts is now over 270 and that’s just since the start of 2025. And we’re seeing more and more grassroots ground swell against this. Um, and like we were saying earlier, it’s a bipartisan thing. You will literally see um DSA candidates and MAGA candidates together, people who are more centrist, like everybody is riled up about this issue. They’re speaking out at their city council meetings. In in looking at our database of cancellations, the most common thing that local governments site when they get rid of a flock contract or another ALPR contract is that they got a lot of backlash from people on the ground who were concerned about privacy concerns. So if if you feel voiceless in this fight because your city has ALPRs, I promise you you’re not voiceless in this fight because we’ve seen over and over again that if people bring these concerns to their local government, they will take it more seriously than if those concerns are brought from like a national lens.
All right, thank you so much guys for coming in and talking with us today. Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, thank you. And thanks to all of you for watching and listening