Flock and Ring Are Champions of the Privatized Surveillance State ⇥ engadget.com

Tim Cushing, Techdirt:

Even if you truly believe the company you work for is capable of doing this, perhaps read the room a bit before offering up this sort of insane assertion to a journalist:

Langley offers a prediction: In less than 10 years, Flock’s cameras, airborne and fixed, will eradicate almost all crime in the U.S. 

That would be Flock Safety CEO (and co-founder) Garrett Langley speaking to Thomas Brewster of Forbes. Flock Safety has grown a lot over the past few years, following paths paved by Amazon’s doorbell surveillance camera acquisition, Ring, and other upstarts in the public/private surveillance mesh network field.

Ring founder Jamie Siminoff made a similarly unsubstantiated claim to Jennifer Pattison Tuohy of the Verge. The reality, however, is that cameras from companies like Flock and Ring are giving a sheen of authority to false accusations made by law enforcement.

In September, for example, Chrisanna Elser of Colorado was falsely accused of theft by a police officer using Flock’s cameras. The entire exchange was recorded on her doorbell camera. 404 Media obtained body camera footage which showed the officer refused to see exonerating evidence, in the form of cameras on her Rivian truck and a Ring camera at her tailor’s house. This is just a mass surveillance race to the bottom. The officer in question was required to complete additional training for politeness as a result.

Joel Feder, the Drive:

On an otherwise normal Sunday afternoon in late June, I’d decided to take the $155,000 Range Rover I was testing that week out to run some errands with my wife. Little did I know that choice would complete a technological chain linking surveillance cameras, AI, and law enforcement that led to me and my wife being surrounded by police, hands on their guns, in a Kohl’s parking lot in suburban Minnesota.

Without spoiling this story too much, this was the result of a typo that affected several more vehicles than the one Feder was driving.

Max Miller, Engadget:

Although Flock cameras are often referred to as license plate readers, that’s reductive. Reading license plates is their primary task, but they can be used to track just about anyone or anything. Even without a license plate, law enforcement officers can search for things such as, hypothetically, “green sedan with American flag bumper sticker,” or, “pickup truck with paint scratches on left side and dirt bike in truck bed.” Reducing Flock ALPRs to license plate readers is a bit like calling your own eyes “Engadget article readers” simply because that’s what you’re using them for at this particular moment. The company also offers AI surveillance cameras which do track individuals.

I keep thinking about Elser’s story. The way she was implicated was thanks to a network of cameras surveilling her every public move, and the way she was exonerated was because of documentary evidence from a bunch of cameras surveilling her every public move. It was not very long ago that U.S. media was freaking out about the number of CCTV cameras in the U.K., but the U.S. has quickly caught up. There are hundreds across Canada, too.

To state the obvious, this ubiquitous surveillance has not eradicated crime. What it has done is give police the false confidence to accuse random people of crimes they did not commit. It has also allowed police to stalk people for personal reasons, despite major investors Andreessen Horowitz claiming critics “overlook the vigilant protections in place to ensure that Flock cannot be used for surveillance or to violate privacy”. That is nonsense — perhaps a lie, similar to those told by Flock. But it is not a lie any greater than the idea that we can eradicate crime if we just have more cameras with A.I. features.