Flock Safety sells cameras, drones and license plate recognition systems to police departments across the United States. It is now being criticized from both ends of American politics at once, TechCrunch reports.
The immediate cause is a Washington Post investigation that identified 46 cases in which police officers were accused of using Flock technology for unauthorized purposes, including stalking former partners.
The unusual shape of the opposition
Senator Bernie Sanders posted: "STOP AI MASS SURVEILLANCE. STOP FLOCK." Abdul El-Sayed, running in Michigan, accused opponents of supporting the "mass proliferation of Flock cameras".
Three House Republicans have introduced a bill that would bar federal purchases of automated surveillance systems using facial recognition, biometric identification or license plate recognition, "including a Flock Safety camera". The bill names the company.
These are not the same objection. The left's version is about mass surveillance as a condition; the right's is about federal purchasing and the reach of government agencies. They point at the same product for different reasons, which is what makes the position awkward for the company: there is no side of the aisle to shelter behind.
What the company says
Garrett Langley, Flock's chief executive, made the case for a middle path. "When people talk about just one of these, privacy or safety, they're prioritizing the wrong thing, and what we have to prioritize as a country is compromise," he said.
On Fox News he argued the gap is regulatory: "Today, it is too often that in Flock and in other technologies, there's no regulation. There's no accountability, and we think that's wrong."
On CBS News, asked about a woman affected by an abuse case, he said: "I apologize. It kills me that she went through that." He also drew a distinction his critics reject: "I don't think that Flock created police abuse. I think we're the first company to ever shine a light on it and build the tools to find it."
That argument deserves to be stated at its strongest, because it is not empty. Audit logs are how the 46 cases were identifiable at all. A paper records system leaves no such trail.
It is also incomplete, because the same logs exist only alongside a capability that did not previously exist. The tool that documents the misuse is the tool that enables it.
The changes, and the exception
Flock has cut its default data retention from 30 days to seven, and now requires officers to enter a case code before accessing data.
Both settings can be overridden through a feature called Evidence Mode, which lets officers preserve data for longer. The American Civil Liberties Union has questioned whether the changes are real reform or public relations.
A default is a strong thing in practice, because most users never change it. An override is what determines the ceiling. Whether these changes matter depends entirely on how often Evidence Mode is used and who checks, and that is the number nobody in this story has.
What we could not establish
We could not establish how many police departments use Flock, how many cameras are deployed, what came of the 46 cases, or how often Evidence Mode is invoked. We did not read the Washington Post investigation directly and are relying on TechCrunch's account of it, from a single publication.
