Flock cameras, privacy and the limits of police surveillance

Programming supported by Topline Construction Firm, your local woman owned and operated roofing contractor, offering sustainable American-made steel roofing and siding with unmatched durability, roofing, deck, siding, and aluminum seamless gutters. More at Topline ConstructionFirm.com. Good morning. I'm Catherine Richard, filling in for Angela Davis today, and you're listening to NPR News. We've had traffic cameras and license plate readers for years. But flock cameras are part of something different. It's a connected system that can build a record of where a vehicle has been. Police say that information can be really useful in their work. It helps them find stolen cars or solve crimes. But civil liberties groups and others worry that it amounts to location tracking without a warrant. That concern has been behind some city's decisions to stop using the technology. In fact, just last night, the North Branch City Council voted to remove their cameras. And in other places, vandals have stolen or destroyed cameras. So this hour, we're going to talk about how much privacy we actually can have when we're driving around in public. And we'll explore what limits the Constitution puts on police collecting and searching this kind of information. And we want to hear from you as well. Do you think flock cameras are a reasonable tool for police or an invasion of privacy? And what do you want to know about how these cameras work? The phone lines are open. Call us at 651-227,000 or 800. 242-2828. Now I'm going to bring in our guests. We have William McGovern. He is the dean of the University of Minnesota Law School where he teaches courses on data privacy. Good morning, Bill. Thank you for being with us. Good morning. Thanks for having me. All right. So I think probably the first question on everyone's mind, including my own, is how are these actually different from the traffic cameras and license plate readers we've had for so many years? As you say, it's more than a decade there have been cameras. There's a few ways in which flock is different. So there were always some privacy concerns about the cameras we had, but flock kind of turbocharges those. So number one, there's just a lot more of them. New York Times reports as, you know, 125,000 around the country in every state in the continental U.S. And so that kind of ubiquity blanketing the space is a big difference than the past. A second difference is that they're networked together. So it's not just that there's one camera pointed at this easy pass lane or toll booth to see if you paid your bill. It's that that information is going into a database that's being shared widely. to a lot of different jurisdictions. Okay. When you say jurisdictions, are you talking about law enforcement jurisdictions or can anyone access these databases? So it is a law enforcement database. There are also many private customers of flock, homeowners associations, parking lots. I mean, when I drive into the University of Minnesota parking lot, there's an ALPR.

that checks my license plate to make sure I have a contract for a parking space. But this kind of networked database is a law enforcement resource. Okay. So you mentioned your license plate. What other types of information can these flock cameras gather? That's another difference from the past. The old-fashioned ALPR's automated license plate readers pretty much just read your tag and saw what the six digits or eight digits there were. Flock goes further. knows the make model color of your car. It reads your bumper stickers. It finds scratches and bumps on the back part of your car. And all that can go in the database as well. So we're going to talk a lot about maybe some of the concerns that people have with how these are used. But why would a law enforcement agency look at this system and say, oh, wow, this could be really helpful? Absolutely. I mean, there's a lot of use cases where it can be very... helpful to law enforcement. You mentioned finding stolen cars, and that's a big one that have hot lists in the database. So once a stolen car shows up, it kind of flags that that's been seen someplace and gives the location where it was seen. And that could be very useful, obviously. Another situation is amber alerts or silver alerts, right? And so if you know that someone might be in a car with a tag number, even an incomplete license plate number, you can flag when that shows up as well. So the ability to kind of be a sentinel looking out for a car that you have reason to be searching for and have the cameras doing that looking for you is definitely useful to law enforcement. Now, according to the company, they've said that the default setup for the data that's collected is not shared with federal agencies. But have we seen examples of that actually happening? Yeah, tons of examples of sharing to federal agencies. You know, Flock takes a position that we just put the cameras out there and the departments do what they do with them. But Flock knows very well that a lot of the use of the cameras is the inter-jurisdictional sharing. So... There's many, many examples of ICE having access to the data from the cameras by working with a local law enforcement agency that runs a search for them, including in Minnesota. Yeah, I mean, do we know anything more about how that information was used here? Yeah, so the Star Tribune did an investigative report, and based on what they were able to determine, they didn't always, weren't always able to figure out exactly how the case ended, but they did find many immigration-related... inquiries into the database by jurisdictions in Minnesota, which is not actually supposed to be allowed by the law. Okay. Now, if you're just joining our conversation, we are talking about flock cameras today and data privacy. We want you to join our conversation. Do you think flock cameras are a reasonable tool for police to use, or do you feel like they're an invasion of your privacy? What do you want to know about flock cameras in Minnesota? How they work, what they can see. Give us a call at 651-227,000, or 800-242-2828.

So there has been a lot of focus on these cameras. They're made by Flock Safety. That's a private company that's based in Atlanta. But it's just one type of system. Are there other brands like this out there? Maybe not so prolifically used. Yeah, there are, Flock has competitors. They have done a really good job of dominating the market, however. And they've done that in a number of ways, including the way that they... our network together, which can be attractive. Their pricing system, they're basically leased. And so Flock kind of takes care of the back end work and the police department just sort of pays an annual fee. And just really strong, aggressive marketing. So there are other companies, Axon, Motorola, that also have ALPRs. And there are many ALPRs that are just, you know, one fixed camera that's doing its own thing and not really part of a network at all. But when it comes to these sort of network surveillance-oriented ALPRs, a flock is far and away the market leader. Okay. And are they just taking pictures no matter of the brand? Are they actually taking videos as well? So then a lot of them are just taking still images. But of course, they can, some of them do sort of click, click, click, click, click. And so, you know, five quick photos is essentially a video. But it's important to remember that what they're showing really is. the rear of the vehicles passing underneath it. So they're not looking at the people around or that, you know, they are fixed on one location. They're not like sort of swiveling around looking at the neighborhood or something. So they have a pretty limited focus. But for that focus, it's taking a lot of images. Flux says billions of images a month. Wow. Okay. Now, you mentioned earlier that it's not just law enforcement community or agencies that are using these. colleges, homeowners associations, what do we know about why they're adopting these cameras and how they're using them? That's right. I mean, they might be flock cameras, but there might be other brands, but it's just a very handy way to figure out if a car is where it's supposed to be. And... In a lot of those uses, it's really quite limited, right? It's saying we have a list of the license plates that are, you know, signed a monthly contract to be in this parking lot. And if it's one of those license plates, the arm will come up and we'll let them in. That's a pretty simple, straightforward use. What Flock has done is taken that kind of more pedestrian use that used to happen, or it's not pedestrian driving, and said, we're going to put them together across jurisdictions so that people can. effectively track a car moving from place to place. Right, which I can imagine, again, just going back to how these could be useful, you know, oftentimes we find that once something is out of the jurisdiction of law enforcement or whatever, you know, it's really hard for them to get more information about the stolen car or maybe the child who's missing. Okay, we have some calls coming in now. We have Robert from Owatana on the line. Robert, what do you want to share with us? I guess my big view is I don't even understand why it's a question of invasion of privacy. It definitely is. Definitely a violation of our constitutional rights. And I don't, just because it's electronic data doesn't mean that it's, it's not part of me. And I also don't think that it's right. Like a lot of the police departments maybe have like a 30-day contract.

and then they no longer have access to the data, but flop keeps it. They sell it. That's my data. You want it. You should have to buy it for me. You know, it's not yours to sell. All right, Robert. Well, thanks for calling in. I feel like there's two things we should talk about there. I mean, first, is this a violation of? constitutional rights. So that's really the $64,000 question, isn't it? So the Fourth Amendment requires a warrant for searches. The Supreme Court has twice now, the second time just a couple months ago in June. ruled that a bunch of uses of cell phone data to track location require a warrant of the Constitution. The Fourth Amendment says you need a warrant for an unreasonable search or seizure. For a reasonable search or seizure, you have to get approval by a warrant that a judge scrutinizes and says, yes, you can do that. So far, though, ALPRs have been seen as just looking at things that are in plain view on the street, right? And the idea is... You know, a police officer standing there who sees your car driving by and notices that it's the license plate of the stolen car isn't doing a search. They're just seeing something in plain view. There's been litigation in a number of places that's working its way through. I think there's a strong argument that this is like the cell phone data. It's one thing if you see it out in the open. It's another thing if you aggregate that together in a giant database so that you have 24-7 eyes on everything. that that might come to being the kind of search that requires a warrant under the Constitution. But it's still early. It's only been in the lower court so far. You just have to look at that example. of the cell phones from the Supreme Court to now. Once again, technology moving faster than the speed of law here. That's right. Exactly. And then the other thing that Robert mentioned, and I just want to make sure we're getting our facts right here, he talked about these like short term contracts that law enforcement has. Is that accurate? And like, what happens after that. So I think what Robert's referring to is the retention period. So you mentioned at the top that the default retention period is 30 days for the data and then it gets purged. way, law enforcement agencies can set that number lower or higher. That's just the default from FLOC. I don't think that FLOC is selling this data, but there are plenty of examples of surveillance camera, whether it's ALPRs or other kind of cameras that do package data and use it in, you know, sell it to data brokers or consumer agencies and things like that. If you're just joining our conversation today, we're talking about flock cameras and data privacy. We want to know if you think flock cameras are a reasonable tool for police or an invasion of privacy. And if you have questions about how they work and what sort of data they collect, you can give us a call at 651-227,000 or 800 242-2828. We have Brenna in Oakdale on the line. Brenna, what do you want to share?

Hi, thanks for taking my call. I'm actually an attorney in Minneapolis. I'm not speaking on behalf of any agency, but we have seen a huge influx of cases where these slot cameras are being used. It's inherently an invasion of privacy as the government aggregates our data, collects it, shares it with other agencies. And by the time we know exactly how that's happening, by the time we actually get information about, you know, the documentation, the paper trails about where this information goes, by then the rights of so many have already been trampled upon. It feels like the extent to which they're being used is being downplayed. We saw a post on social media from Minneapolis. The city of Minneapolis saying that they don't use SWAT cameras. Well, they do. They do and they use them regularly. And that information is readily available as well. It feels like setting up an infrastructure for the next federal invasion, where these companies... Eventually can be pressured by these federal organizations, and there we are again, being surveilled in a way that I don't think any Minnesotans really. So Brenna, I want to keep you here for a second. As an attorney in Hennepin County, I mean, is there anything that your side of the legal structure here can do to, I mean, you mentioned by the time you know that these cameras are being used, like it's really far along. I mean, is there anything you can do or any sort of recourse that the county has here? You know, what many attorneys in my position representing defendants. We have been litigating as much as possible, right? Making motions to get the information, the underlying information of the specific cameras and how they're working and also where the information is going. Making motions to dismiss because of the violation of our client's constitutional rights in the state of sharing. Again, if an officer is outside and they see something, they can report on that. They see it. What doesn't happen is every other police agency in the region getting that information simultaneously. I know there's been some talk about how these tools can be useful, say, in an amber alert situation. But truly, those examples that are used by law enforcement to justify these kind of cameras are really playing on the fear of people, right? So as we litigate on one side, there's... a message being out there that you need these for your safety. I think that's one of the oldest tropes we've ever had about surveilling citizens.

Brenda, thank you so much for your call. We appreciate it. Bill, you've been sitting here just nodding your head. Yeah. I mean, there's a lot of themes in what Brenda talked about. I mean, one of them is just when you aggregate a lot of information, it becomes a huge temptation to use it. And that's something we see over and over in privacy issues that, you know, as she points out, if you have all of this information, everyone's going to say, well, why don't we use it for this purpose or that purpose or the other purpose? And so that's one of them. the real concerns people have about flock cameras different than the past. It's the aggregation of so much data. And I also was just nodding because, you know, it's criminal defense lawyers who are often the people who are in the position where they're the ones fighting these fights. So often big Fourth Amendment cases come originally from a criminal prosecution. where some evidence was used that was gathered in a way that might violate the Fourth Amendment and that person's lawyer challenged it and it made its way up the courts and then that sets a precedent for the future. So how this law gets made is through criminal defense attorneys kind of pushing back on surveillance. Okay. We have Dave in St. Louis Park. Dave, what do you want to share with us today? Hey, everyone. Thanks for taking my call. And I just want to, you know, echo and agree with, you know, obviously there are valid use cases that I don't think anybody would disagree with as far as, you know, tracking really severe emergencies like Amber or Silver Alerts. And I guess as part of that legislation and the comment about, you know, if there's a technology they're going to be used, I'm wondering what kind of. you know, policy decisions or guidelines do you think will make it into the law that prevent, you know, personal use of these technologies? I've read instances of officers or the law enforcement using it to, you know, track down their exes or ex, you know, partners or things like that. And I'm just wondering if there are things like, hey, in order to request this information you need. two people, for example, in order to get that, or if there's other more concrete checks and balances that can be worked into the use of this technology. Thank you, Dave. Excellent question, Bill. Yeah, so it depends where you are. Minnesota actually has a number of really strong laws about the way that ALPRs are used. There's a group at NYU Law School called the Policing Project that ranked the states about how good are their ALPR rules. And Minnesota was in the top five. We have rules requiring audits. We have limitations on the use. We have a requirement that when you're sharing data, you're supposed to have sharing agreements that spell out all the details. And you're not allowed to use them under the law for immigration enforcement or enforcement of other states' abortion restrictions. The list goes on of the restrictions. And that's great. Those are good rules, and I think they have definitely helped prevent some of the abuses or problems that we've seen in other states. And indeed, there are dozens of instances of individual officers using it for personal reasons. Yeah, say more about that. What does that actually look like? So, you know, the Institute for Justice, which is a sort of libertarian conservative group in Virginia, just from...

Public sources, just essentially looking at news sources around the country and court filings, found several dozen instances of individual officers getting on the system and using it to, as the caller suggests, track down an ex-partner or engage in behavior that is just personally trying to stalk somebody else. Some of those people have ended up going to jail. But you need to have a strong... system in place for how the data is used and accessed. And you have to have controls on who can get into the database and then audits of looking afterwards to make sure they had a good reason. And jurisdiction by jurisdiction, how well those rules are in place and enforced will really vary. Minnesota is actually much better than most places in that regard. And has flock instituted more controls over who can access some of this information? Flock mostly, I mean, they talk a lot about privacy controls, To my mind, when you look deeply into it, they essentially say the police departments are doing their job and they're restricting the access of their people to this data. They'll say, here are our rules about who's supposed to see it, but they're not the ones enforcing it. They leave that to the police departments to enforce it in their own departments. Got it. Okay. We have Tom and Howard Lake on the line. Tom, what do you want to share with us? My wife had concerns about, does the camera actually take your photo? If it's you driving the car or if you loan your car to somebody else. The second question she had was, does anybody know how long they keep this data? Great. Thank you, Tom. Yeah, Bill, go ahead. I can answer both. So, yeah, they're not seeing who drives the car. They're seeing that the car was there because they're really just the photos are of the back bumper of the car, the license plate, the bumper, the fender. So no, it could be someone who borrowed your car or often stole your car, and that's what they're tracking is the location of the car, not the person. Of course. you can make some assumptions, right? If you're tracking a car for a month and you don't think it's stolen, you are in fact tracking that person most likely. And in terms of retention of the data, Flock has a 30-day default rule, but individual departments can make that shorter or longer. Okay, great. We're going to have to take a break for news here in just a minute. We have lots of great calls coming in. So if you're hanging on, stay with us. We'll get to your calls. But before we do that, I want to go to Kate in Duluth. Kate, what do you want to share with us? Hey, I love the discussion. I'm an attorney and a former federal. I'm speaking only. You broke up there for just a minute. Can you repeat your title? Go ahead. All right. Yeah. I'm an attorney, former federal prosecutor, and I'm speaking only for myself here. I've done some writing on Fourth Amendment and take an issue with the reasonable expectation of privacy doctrine and how it falls apart in specific context. and especially in the digital context with the aggregation of data. And I know your guest has touched on this a little bit, but I think it's important for the regular public to understand some of the fire points of the doctrine because it impacts how we protect our rights and how we push for change. And so I'm wondering if the guests could talk specifically about how the reasonable expectation of privacy framework.

gets sort of contrived in this digital context. And I know you already talked about criminal litigation and availing our rights of under the Fourth Amendment and criminal litigation. But I think it's important for people to understand that's really the only remedy for a Fourth Amendment violation. So if you're out on the street and you're getting pictured by these cameras, you know, the only way to avail yourself your Fourth Amendment rights is to get charged with a crime and then move to suppress. Thank you so much, Kate. Bill? You know, we spend several class sessions in my privacy law class at the University of Minnesota talking about the reasonable expectations of privacy test. That's really the kind of doctrinal North Star for Fourth Amendment jurisprudence, and it's really out of date. Yeah. And it was not written to keep up with our digital age. And the two cases that I mentioned that the Supreme Court has decided about cell phone location. tracking, both start to put pressure on that doctrine and say, well, you know, normally the reasonable expectation of privacy test would not think that you had a reasonable expectation of privacy out in public in your movements. But in this case, because it's your cell phone that you carry on your body all the time, we're going to say that that counts. And so the Supreme Court is just starting to show some signs. And there were... dissents and concurrences galore in these cases with every different justices idea of what we should do instead. They're still working that part out. But I absolutely agree that the test that we've been using is really not not ready for the digital age and the aggregation of large pools of data together. That's not what the founders had in mind when they imagined, you know, the red coat's coming in to search your individual house. Very different situation. So, Bill, we've been talking a lot about, like, the legal aspects of how this data is collected and used. We've talked about how they work. But, you know, people are concerned about privacy in general right now. And these cameras are very visible. You can just see them out there. Do you think they've become a proxy for... People's broader concerns about privacy, especially as we've seen some, you know, for instance, in Winona near me, just stolen and taken and destroyed. Absolutely. I mean, you've got people out there with chainsaws cutting down the poles that they're on. I think that's right. I think the flock camera is something that raises legitimate privacy concerns, especially because of how it's networked like we were talking about. But it's... become kind of a stand-in because you can see it as you drive past and because people have, you know, used a site like deflocked to do a crowdsourced map of all the places in the country that they are. But I think it's standing in for a larger unease about some of the many ways that law enforcement and other government functions are using aggregated data. So you can see the flock camera. you can't see the fact that law enforcement routinely buys from data brokers consumer lists with all kinds of dossier information about everybody and just hangs on to that to potentially use it in any kind of investigation. And as our previous caller pointed out, who's a lawyer, that's completely okay under the Fourth Amendment because nothing's technically being searched. It's just, you know, they went on the market and they bought up something that is a resource of information.

You can't see that, though. You don't drive by it. And so I think the flock cameras have become kind of the leading edge of people's concern about the amount of data collection and aggregation that's happening. And what is so interesting to me is even just in the last week, we've seen instances of vandalization of these cameras, but also we've seen some local law enforcement agencies decide not to reinstall. Winona lost eight cameras. They are not going to put them back in. And they cited, you know, deterioration of public trust as part of that decision. Duluth has made a similar decision. New Brighton last night voted not to continue their program. I mean, what do you think that says about how law enforcement is responding to some of these concerns? I mean, law enforcement relies on public trust in their integrity. And when an issue like this starts to really take hold and make people feel like the police are not on their side or not respecting their privacy interests, that undermines the police ability to do their job. And if the controversy gets big enough and the outcry large enough, they will respond and do something different. I think that they do many, many other things that people find objectionable, but you don't have the same kind of, you know, here we are talking about this for an hour on NPR. There's lots of news coverage of it. There's lots of online chatter about it. And so it becomes difficult to ignore. If... controversy about other things arose this much, I think police departments might re-examine some of their other methods too. Yeah. Okay, we have Paul in Minneapolis, who's been waiting patiently. Paul, what do you want to share with us today? Yeah, so in addition to some of these civil liberties concerns, there have been reported, at least in the past, there's quite a few security vulnerabilities with the flock cameras. There's a YouTuber Ben Jim Jordan, and he reported with 404 Media on, I mean, essentially if someone knew how, and again, this was a couple months ago, so it may have been fixed by now, but someone could get into and look at some of these feeds just as a normal person standing near the camera. And so the company's response to that, they sort of just double down. And so even if they fixed some of these things, it really doesn't feel like this is a company that cares a lot about security and, you know, patching vulnerabilities in their product. Yeah, I mean, obviously anything on the, anything that's connected is vulnerable to hacking. What can you say about that? I'm really glad you brought up that issue because we talked a little bit earlier in the hour about how every time you collect a large pool of information, it becomes tempting to use it in different ways. The same holds here. Every time you are collecting information and retaining it, it becomes a vulnerability. And hackers, if it's anywhere plugged into a network, hackers may find a way.

to penetrate it. And, you know, I think the specific problems documented about flock that the caller was referring to are serious, but they're not unusual. I mean, I think a lot of times when you have this data collected, you're going to have someone who tries to get in. They might do it as a form of protest. They might do it to go sell the information on the dark web. But whatever they're doing with it, it is definitely the case that the more information you collect and pool together, and hold for a length of time, the more vulnerable it is. All right. We have Alex in Minneapolis. Alex, thank you so much for waiting for so long. What's your question today? Sure. Well, I think, you know, there's the issue of how the data is going to be kept. I think you made a comment that the data, the pictures aren't supposed to go to federal entities. But there's been cases of ICE getting a hold of the image. That's right. Okay. So I think it's problematic that we're just glossing over that in general. You know, it's not a stretch, I think, for the data to get into ICE's hands or get into the Palantier databases.

You know, pictures of vehicles with political stickers that may not align with the current administration. People could be targeted. Yeah. I mean, there's so many unknowns of where... this this data can go or or how it can be used yeah i think i think just kind of glossing over that well the federal entities aren't supposed to be getting this data but ice has been getting the data and which is a little surprised uh Yeah, how are we going to manage that? I mean, that's not okay. Yeah, we've got a lot of callers, and this is a great question. I mean, it takes pictures of license plates, but people put all sorts of stuff on the back of their car. Absolutely. And I think maybe. It may not have stood to reason that a political sticker on the back of a car could be used against you, but I'm sure people living now in the Twin Cities in particular after the recent round of ICE enforcement, that might be something that is top of mind for folks. Look, the Electronic Frontier Foundation found 19 agencies using... ALPRs to surveil no king's rallies and to check the license plates of who is going into the rallies. Now, they said, of course, they were doing it for public security reasons, but that means that those agencies had a list of everyone who went to the protest. Yeah. Okay, we have Ken and Buffalo on the line. Ken, what do you want to share? I'm really struggling with exactly what people are worried about. I mean, if they're going about their own business and You know, in my humble opinion, there should be a camera on every corner. I would feel better about it. And I just struggle that this is a paranoia that's, I don't know. What are you worried about if you're following the law and doing your thing as a citizen? Yeah. You know, what are you worried about? Ken, I'm so glad you called because I think this is sometimes something that I even think about as I think about all the information about myself that's out there on the internet. I'm like, well, I guess that ship sailed, you know, what am I going to do about it? Bill, you're nodding your head vigorously here. Yeah, I mean, this is a completely legitimate point of view. This is the nothing to hide point of view, but it obviously has limits. And every time we're talking about this in a conversation, we're talking about a balance, right? I mean, you can say a camera. in every room of everyone's house would probably solve crime better, but no one wants that. On the other hand, a number of callers have pointed out, right? We want the police to have access to information so that they can, you know, promote public safety. And every time you're having this conversation, you're trying to strike a balance. The one thing I'd push back on, though, is the sort of the idea that if you're behaving yourself, you have necessarily nothing to worry about here. You know, if you find out everything about me and you would like to hurt me, you can.

There's always the possibility of information being used in a vindictive way by the authorities. And everybody needs to be concerned about too much information being in the hands of people who have decided that they would like to prosecute you. Now, that might seem paranoid to some, but, you know, there's certainly been lots of instances of local police departments. first figuring out who it is that they'd like to take care of and then finding the evidence to do that. And, you know, you hope that the police would not behave that way, but the reality is historically sometimes they do. I just want to note that Paul and Mound wrote in with a similar comment. He said that he is torn about the use of flock cameras. He understands the concerns about privacy, but said that he drives for a living and there are some crazy drivers out there, said he sees near misses and people running red lights every day and people need to be. be held accountable. I think that sort of echoes some of the perspective that Ken shared with us as well. I want to go now to Steve in Minneapolis. Steve, what do you want to share? Hey there. It's super briefly, I want to say in response to a caller, like I think we just have to be really aware of the unequal application of the law as well and folks of marginalized populations. often getting the law leverage against them in ways that folks with more privilege don't. But my main call-in points were one, we talk about block cameras being potentially a tool of public safety. But even the way they're installed, they're not put on breakaway poles. So if there's a car accident with them, the likelihood of a fatality is much higher than your average side of the road sign. And then in addition to that, I have some real concerns about beyond flock, how private cameras, like ring cameras and other things, The data in that is also accessible to law enforcement. There was, you know, a lot of conversation about the visibility of flock cameras and then becoming this icon of our surveillance world. And yet so many of us have cameras installed right on the fronts of our houses facing the streets and adding to that network as well. And I know that's not directly in the flock network, but I think it's a relevant part of the conversation. Really good points, Steve. Let's take – first, he talked about not using breakaway posts to install – to minimize harm to cars. I mean, is there anything you can say about that bill? I mean – So I hadn't heard that before, but I think it gets added to the list of concerns people might have. Yeah, okay. And I mean, yeah, I – We have a security system that has cameras and it makes us feel safer. How does that fit into just this broader landscape of surveillance? Are they any different? Well, they're a little bit different insofar as flock actually is on the computer in the police station that they can call it up right now. If they want to look at your ring camera, they've got to go out to your house and get you to give it to them. That said... This goes back to the same point as before. Having more information being recorded in more places by more people greatly increases the amount of information the police might have access to. And by all means, they can, when there's a crime on a street, they will definitely ask for everybody's ring cameras up and down the block. There was a big controversy about the Super Bowl ad, about using doorbell cameras and networking them for neighborhood watch. And that actually...

caused that company to back down. But the more you see images or data being collected all over the place by private entities, that all becomes available. The cell phone cases, the data was held by the phone companies, but the police went and got it from them. If you're just joining our conversation, we are talking today about flock cameras and data privacy. We want you to join our conversation. We want to know if you think flock cameras are a reasonable tool for police or whether you think they're an invasion of your privacy. And if you have questions about how they're used, where the information goes, you can give us a call at 651-227,000 or 800 24228.28. I just want to note my colleague Brian Bax, who covers politics, but always has CNN on, telling me through Slack right now that the CEO of Flock is on CNN as we speak and is talking about some of the new safety measures. I want to mention them and just maybe go back to that for a second. Mandatory audit monitoring to detect unusual activity required search justification, reducing default data retention period to seven days and greater access controls and oversight. Is this new based on what we know? Yep. These all sound new to me. I think it's another example, just like we were talking about, the police departments responding to public outcry. It sounds to me, based on what you're conveying, that flock is also making more changes to tighten up the way that they hold their data. I mentioned earlier that their general approach has been to say, It's up to the departments to have these rules. But moving from 30 days as a default to seven days as a default and requiring audit would be big changes. Yeah, and Brian just said, Garrett Langley, he's the founder and CEO of the company, he said, quote, for us, safety is a fundamental right. So it does sound like this is a response to some of those concerns. Okay, I want to go now to Carlos in Minneapolis. Carlos, what do you want to share with us? Oh, hi, good morning. I have a shop here in North Minneapolis, and we have a big parking lot. We've been having a lot of issues with people coming in the middle of the night to drink, and I don't know what they really do, but every day in the morning, we found beer cans, liquor.

So a few days ago, I guess the police or I'm not sure who did. They brought this trailer with a big pole and they put like two big cameras on the tap right in the middle of the street. And now everybody's gone. And I love it. So my shop is not clean. It's safe. I have no issues anymore. No garbage. And I mean, thank you. I mean, whoever did, I don't even know what it's for, but. my life. I mean, seriously. Carlos, thank you for sharing that perspective. I mean, it does sound like here's a happy customer, right? Well, absolutely. Although I will point out, it sounds from what Carlos said, like what has changed is that there's a very visible pole camera. And you might have seen this around. There are these sort of mobile things on wheels that are tall cameras and then they, you know, they're very obviously surveilling. As some security experts have pointed out, one way to do this is to just wheel one of those up and not turn it on. Yeah. Right. Okay. So visually speaking, it looks like it's on. Yeah. No one knows the better. The deterrent effect of it is... Meaningful. I mean, there's lots of other things you can do. You can, you know, I mean, it's the same reason that some parking lots, you know, play bad pop songs to keep people from misusing their property. That would deter me for sure. I mean, if you walk into a 7-Eleven, sometimes you'll hear them playing music outside. That's why. It's not for your entertainment. But I think that the idea of deterring bad behavior by having surveillance. is meaningful, but it also means that the, you know, pervasive surveillance is a risk to everybody. And this does go back also to the question of differential enforcement, right? Those polls most often get wheeled into certain neighborhoods where underprivileged populations live. And they're more likely to be the ones who are deterred or targeted in this way. Yeah. I want to take a call from Aubrey in Geneva. Aubrey, what do you want to share with us? Hello. Kind of just commenting on the guy from earlier that said, well, if you're not doing anything, then what do you have to worry about? Just a little rebuttal. I've seen this morning multiple videos of people being the license reader wrongly reading someone's license. And there was a woman actually in Milwaukee that had that happen to her twice. And the reader was thinking it was a car tied to a homicide. So she had her car surrounded by police on the highway and guns pulled on and as a black woman being scared she was going to be shot. So. I do think there is the risk of error, and that should strongly be taken into account because there are innocent people that could be put in dangerous situations as well. Yeah, I mean, I think this gets at two things I want to spend more time on, Bill, which is at first the uneven distribution of who's affected by this, but also, you know, have we seen situations where...

They got it wrong. Yeah, absolutely. There's errors all the time. And, you know, a police overreaction to a hot list car being flagged could lead to a really dangerous situation. I mean, that's irresponsible police activity. I think sometimes it's tempting to believe the computer, right? The computer is right. It's giving you a truth. And so sometimes I think... more training of officers to understand what they're seeing when they see these hits and the possibility that, you know, it is a lead, but it is not, you know, absolutely true just because the computer says so. And, yeah, I do want to again say that, you know, when you look at deflocked, there are patterns to the neighborhoods where these cameras end up. And deflocked. Can you just tell our audience what that is? Yeah, we mentioned it really briefly earlier. It's an anti, it's one of the sort of protest sites about these flock cameras, but they have. a crowdsource map of the locations so you can download their app and then if you see a flock camera you can upload the information of the location and they have a map with dots so if you pull up Minnesota, you can see dots for all the places where citizens have said they spotted cameras. Okay. And I just want to note, too, that we did have a caller who had to leave from New Brighton, but wrote down a comment. There's a website where you can check if you've been looked up. Have I been flocked dot com? Is that a similar? Similar kind of thing. And you can put in your own license plate. How do you know if it's accurate, though, right? You don't. And it's certainly incomplete, right? So that's actually for what it really is doing is there are some agencies that where the data is more publicly available, those are not most of them. So I would say if you do get a hit there, you're not only finding out that you've been flocked, but that whatever agency is in that jurisdiction is not doing a very good job of managing their data. Okay. We're going to take one more call here from Elise in Minneapolis. Elise, what do you want to share with us? Hi, I had a question, honestly, not regarding the law enforcement use of flock cameras, but the private contracts you guys mentioned earlier. Who is contracting with flock? Can any company just do that? I mean, can anyone just access this data if they have a contract with flock? Thanks, Elise. We've talked a little bit about this, but maybe for listeners who haven't are just joining in the conversation. Again, Bill, who can contract with flock? So anyone, homeowners associations, parking lot attendants, malls used flock cameras, but they're not networked with the law enforcement database in the same way. It still does raise the concerns about all automated license plate readers and the fact that they are sort of tracking movement. But the law enforcement issues, I think, have gotten more attention because the network database is something that's for law enforcement purposes. Okay. And I said we were only going to take one more call, but I'm going to squeeze one more in here from Scott in Wisconsin. Scott, what do you want to share? Hi, how are you doing? Great. Thank you.

I guess my major question here and statement is we've been living with this aggregated data and surveillance for quite some time, whether it be DOT cameras, streaming, which I access on a regular basis for like Canal Park and other areas to see what's going on if the weather's nice, et cetera. But if I have access to it, of course, the police have access to it. Now, my major question here is, What's the percentage of improper use versus proper use? By proper use, I mean convictions, tickets, et cetera. Improper use, there's a litany of ability for improper use, like stalking and all those things that have been in the news lately. Great. Thanks, Scott. I mean, do we have any sense of like what the proportion is here? Yeah, I don't have good numbers. And it actually a little bit begs the larger question, which is what would the right numbers be? Right, yeah. And I think that, that, it goes to the fact this is always a society balancing the risks and the benefits. And, you know, there would be some people who would say, you know, even small amounts of misuse mean that we should never have surveillance systems like this. Others might be willing to tolerate a little bit more. But certainly the backlash against flock, I think, has to do with a lot of different risks and a lot of different instances of misuse that people have observed. And the question is, can we find a surveillance system that is controlled enough and rigorously enough enforced and narrowly enough used that we can live with it? I would go back to the things we said about the Fourth Amendment before. Search warrants are a really good mechanism for saying, okay, this is a situation where this search is reasonable, there's probable cause it's tied to a crime. You, the officers, have told us what you're looking for specifically, and a judge has approved it. You know, I think those are great mechanisms to make sure that we're searching in ways that are appropriate. Yeah. One thing that I found so interesting about this debate, and I want to just get your take on this before we have to wrap up, is that it does feel like this is a issue that elicits strong emotions from people on the left and the right. And just... To make that point, we know that groups from the ACLU and the Libertarian Organization Institute for Justice have both filed lawsuits on this. It's bringing people together. What can you tell us about some of those lawsuits that are pending? Yeah, I think it's really fascinating to see how this is not a blue, red, left, right debate. And the Institute for Justice's lawsuit was dismissed recently in Virginia by a judge who said, well, I'm not sure I see the problem. at that scale yet, but it's possible it could develop into one. The ACLU and Electronic Frontier Foundation still have a lawsuit pending in California, but the fact that it's many different kinds of groups that oppose it, and also you'll see defenders of it who might have both party affiliations after their name. So it's definitely a cross-cutting issue, and I think most privacy issues are.

Yeah. Anything else you'll be watching for in coming months around this from the court perspective? Well, I'm really fascinated to find out more about what Brian Backs just reported in terms of what kind of restrictions there are. Maybe if those restrictions are tough enough, we might finally have struck the balance I've been talking about. Okay. Well, our time is up for today. I want to thank our guest. William McGovern is the dean of the University of Minnesota Law School where he teaches courses on data privacy. This conversation was produced by Carrie Dwyer. I'm Catherine Richard, filling in for Angela Davis. Have a great day. Thanks for listening to a recording of my live radio show on NPR News. A reminder that if you want to catch my show in real time, tune in and call in weekdays at 9 a.m.