Lawsuit Argues Warrantless Use of Flock Surveillance Cameras Is Unconstitutional (404media.co) 59
A civil liberties group has filed a lawsuit in Virginia arguing that the widespread use of Flock's automated license plate readers violates the Fourth Amendment's protections against warrantless searches. 404 Media reports: "The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program," the lawsuit notes (PDF). "In Norfolk, no one can escape the government's 172 unblinking eyes," it continues, referring to the 172 Flock cameras currently operational in Norfolk. The Fourth Amendment protects against unreasonable searches and seizures and has been ruled in many cases to protect against warrantless government surveillance, and the lawsuit specifically says Norfolk's installation violates that. [...]
The lawsuit in Norfolk is being filed by the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties organization that has filed a series of privacy and government overreach lawsuits over the last few years. Two Virginia residents, Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington, are listed as plaintiffs in the case. Schmidt is a Navy veteran who alleges in the lawsuit that the cops can easily infer where he is going based on Flock data. "Just outside his neighborhood, there are four Flock Cameras. Lee drives by these cameras (and others he sees around town) nearly every day, and the Norfolk Police Department [NPD] can use the information they record to build a picture of his daily habits and routines," the lawsuit reads. "If the Flock Cameras record Lee going straight through the intersection outside his neighborhood, for example, the NPD can infer that he is going to his daughter's school. If the cameras capture him turning right, the NPD can infer that he is going to the shooting range. If the cameras capture him turning left, the NPD can infer that he is going to the grocery store. The Flock Cameras capture the start of nearly every trip Lee makes in his car, so he effectively cannot leave his neighborhood without the NPD knowing about it." Arrington is a healthcare worker who makes home visits to clients in Norfolk. The lawsuit alleges that it would be trivial for the government to identify her clients. "Fourth Amendment case law overwhelmingly shows that license plate readers do not constitute a warrantless search because they take photos of cars in public and cannot continuously track the movements of any individual," a Flock spokesperson said. "Appellate and federal district courts in at least fourteen states have upheld the use of evidence from license plate readers as Constitutional without requiring a warrant, as well as the 9th and 11th circuits. Since the Bell case, four judges in Virginia have ruled the opposite way -- that ALPR evidence is admissible in court without a warrant."
The lawsuit in Norfolk is being filed by the Institute for Justice, a civil liberties organization that has filed a series of privacy and government overreach lawsuits over the last few years. Two Virginia residents, Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington, are listed as plaintiffs in the case. Schmidt is a Navy veteran who alleges in the lawsuit that the cops can easily infer where he is going based on Flock data. "Just outside his neighborhood, there are four Flock Cameras. Lee drives by these cameras (and others he sees around town) nearly every day, and the Norfolk Police Department [NPD] can use the information they record to build a picture of his daily habits and routines," the lawsuit reads. "If the Flock Cameras record Lee going straight through the intersection outside his neighborhood, for example, the NPD can infer that he is going to his daughter's school. If the cameras capture him turning right, the NPD can infer that he is going to the shooting range. If the cameras capture him turning left, the NPD can infer that he is going to the grocery store. The Flock Cameras capture the start of nearly every trip Lee makes in his car, so he effectively cannot leave his neighborhood without the NPD knowing about it." Arrington is a healthcare worker who makes home visits to clients in Norfolk. The lawsuit alleges that it would be trivial for the government to identify her clients. "Fourth Amendment case law overwhelmingly shows that license plate readers do not constitute a warrantless search because they take photos of cars in public and cannot continuously track the movements of any individual," a Flock spokesperson said. "Appellate and federal district courts in at least fourteen states have upheld the use of evidence from license plate readers as Constitutional without requiring a warrant, as well as the 9th and 11th circuits. Since the Bell case, four judges in Virginia have ruled the opposite way -- that ALPR evidence is admissible in court without a warrant."
What's good for the goose... (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be illegal to park outside Flock's HQ in Atlanta and take video of everyone coming and going, with license plates and pictures? Follow them around, builing maps of where they go? Post all this on a public server somewhere? There's no expectation of privacy in public, right?
It wouldn't be illegal (Score:3)
This isn't a problem individuals can solve. It requires organized political action. And intelligent organized political action. You can't go off half cocked. You need to think about who you're voting for and what you're voting for and what they're going to do
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Just a Law (Score:2)
you would have to rewrite the constitution
Really? Why? I'm not American but from what I understand what Flock are doing may not be against the US constitution but neither is it protected by it. All you need is a law to make what they are doing illegal. Indeed, many countries already have data privacy laws that would likely make the data they are collecting highly illegal without explicit permission. Taking photos in public places is usually fine but if you create a database of personally identifiable information data privacy laws immediately apply
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Other countries have much higher expectations of privacy because the people there aren't paranoid creeps like us Americans. People would rise up and scream if you made a law against, say, constantly filming your neighbor's back yard and having cameras looking directly through their windows. ITS MY PROPERTY SO I CAN PUT MY CAMERAS WHERE I WANT AND I"M PROTECTING MY FAMILY is what they will say.
That's illegal (Score:3)
The problem is those laws tend to have exceptions written to them for large companies. Exceptions they explicitly lobbied for. Because the laws aren't federal it's easy to get those exceptions because there are 50 states and hundreds of locales and unless you have a lot of time and money and lawyers you're n
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Would it be illegal to park outside Flock's HQ in Atlanta and take video of everyone coming and going, with license plates and pictures? Follow them around, building maps of where they go? Post all this on a public server somewhere? There's no expectation of privacy in public, right?
I'd be interested to know if there are Flock cameras installed around their HQ and neighborhoods of all the company's executives ... I'm guessing no.
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No, but if its for stalking or harassment and you post that info online you could get into hot water. Flock isn't making the license plate databases public and that's what the government will claim in their defense, unlike you, who posted it for everyone to see, even if to try to make the point that no data is safe. The public will prohibit public collection of license plates, biometrics, etc. way quicker than they'll restrain the government. The public does NOT care that they are spied on routinely or t
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The public will prohibit public collection of license plates, biometrics, etc. way quicker than they'll restrain the government.
How exactly will 'the public' restrain govt? I checked my absentee ballot for the upcoming election. There's no direct issues to vote on, just elected officials. So its really govt will restrict the public before they restrict themselves. Or as some argue, govt doesn't restrict themselves at all
Jeffress told the court: “I don’t think that the FBI will voluntarily set limits on its querying procedures, because law enforcement agencies tend not to take steps to restrict or limit what they can do, for obvious reasons.” https://theintercept.com/2017/... [theintercept.com]
Is the obvious reason, they are above the law or are the law (Judge Dredd style)?
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I don't know what state you live in, so. maybe your state has no way for citizens to get things on the ballot (are there any?), but half of my ballot was specifically direct issues to vote on, that had gotten on to the ballot based on normal people getting out and getting the signatures to get them there.
If you feel strong enough about this, well, go get it on the ballot **to** restrict the government in your area.
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Good luck doing that with most issues.
There is not enough collective support for any particular issue, which doesn't mean something shouldn't be done, it means the avenue to doing so is broken.
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Should be legal.
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However it is a completely different issue when the government is monitoring its citizens. Historically police obtained warrants to surveil citizens. Police also have a requirement to discard materials collected that are not used after six months if I remember correctly once an investigation is dropped.
Our supreme court has been chipping away at the warrant requirements for decades and allowing evidence to
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Would it be illegal to park outside Flock's HQ in Atlanta and take video of everyone coming and going, with license plates and pictures? Follow them around, builing maps of where they go? Post all this on a public server somewhere? There's no expectation of privacy in public, right?
I never get why people, when confronted with a company doing scummy things, will seek to punish the average Joes working there as if they had any part in the decision making process.
The people profiting off of this will be able to defend themselves against something so amateurish. In fact they already do as they screw over the average Joes who work for them hard enough to need it already. The C-levels won't be entering the building through the front door where someone might see or even *gasp* interact wi
Collect Them All (Score:2)
The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move.
IIRC with phones calls the gov just called it "collection" and courts let that slide. It was only a "search" if they used the info later. I'm not sure how this case is going to go better, since it's all "collected" in public from the start.
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The ACLU has a lengthy write-up on this from 2023 How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers [aclu.org] that discusses how:
Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns.
They note conceivably acceptable uses of the technology like checking for stolen vehicles and AMBER alerts, but current systems that do that discard the data once checked. This one doesn't and they have the same objection as in TFS:
But there’s no reason the technology should be used to create comprehensive records of everybody’s comings and goings.
I can easily imagine some LEO searching the database for info on their spouse prior to or
It's ridiculously unconstitutional (Score:5, Insightful)
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But with the current courts God only knows how they're going to rule. ...
They'll rule in favor until one of them gets caught doing something they shouldn't be doing.
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This whole theory we are living in a simulation like the matrix, get more plausible by the day. Welcome to your dystopia. We dont even have to write a good backstory on how we got here.
To sum up ... (Score:2)
He wants to get the Flock out of Norfolk. :-)
\o/ (Score:1)
Let the kickback-negotiations begin!
Is there an app with the location of the ALPRs? (Score:2)
It would be a shame if anything happened to them.
Flock's defense is disingenuous... (Score:5, Interesting)
Flock's defense that all their cameras do is take pictures of vehicles in public is disingenuous, and I hope that this case results in a big restriction on ALPRs.
If the cameras were simply used to take pictures, or were only used to locate a specific license plate for which their was a compelling reason to locate it for law enforcement, then their argument would (perhaps) be sufficient. But the ALPRs are used as part of a system to continuously photograph ALL vehicles traveling in a given locale, identify them, and store the timestamped location in a database. In other words, they are part of a continuous surveillance system that most definitely (from my POV) creates an unconstitutional search capability.
I may not have a special right to privacy with respect to any one or small number of places in which I (or my vehicle) appear in public, but when all of my appearances can be collectively noted and formed into a comprehensive overview of my behavior, it is not significantly less intrusive than if a GPS-based tracker was placed on my vehicle and used to build the same comprehensive overview.
Data Privacy Laws? (Score:2)
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Don't you hae any data privacy laws in the US?
No.
(Somebody might suggest HIPPA, which is for healthcare/medical information. However, all that HIPPA does is make it legal for companies to share and sell your information for any purpose they desire. It sounds like it's supposed to do the opposite, but that's what it really does.)
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With few exceptions (Confidentiality agreement, Court order, Nuclear secrets act, Export restrictions) I can do whatever I want with what information I possess. Information belongs to whomever has it. Facts are not subject to copyright.
What I know about you is not your information, it is MY information. This is how biographies and news reports exist. In the USA, this is a First Amendment protected right.
If I know you committed a crime, I can report it to the authorities, publish it in the news, testify
Homicde solve rate (Score:1)
has the homicide solve rate improved?
\o/ (Score:1)
Is this what case law shows? If so, that's concerning - or is it simply wordplay along the lines of "guns don't kill people, people do"?
Sure the ANPR cannot track movements of an individual but the exact location of each ANPR is known and any photos taken are timestamped and uploaded where, t
I am pretty sure... (Score:2)
that neither license plates nor cameras are mentioned in the constitution
That's Not How That Works (Score:2)
I am pretty sure... that neither license plates nor cameras are mentioned in the constitution
Neither are ball-point pens or modems.
That's not how this works.
That's not how any of this works at all.
(Are you serious?)
Flock can go FLOCK OFF! (Score:2)
Unfortunately (Score:2)
I'm all for restricting governments from taking part in this activity. Unfortunately it is pretty easy to do what they are doing. I certainly could do it. You can set up any kind of camera that feeds images of the plates of passing cars to a computer that can send them to one of many possible recognition services. Google "license plate recognition software" and you will see several. I think a lot of programmer techies could handle this.
Some unobtrusive little battery-powered box holding a camera and a Raspb
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In the USA the ordinary citizen wouldn't legally be able to look up the owners of the plates
Are you sure about that [licenseplatelookup.org]?
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I see that, but look at this;
https://recordsfinder.com/guid... [recordsfinder.com]
"Only law enforcement authorities or other qualified persons can legally lookup license plates."
Majority Decides (Score:2)
What rights the constitution protects is whatever a majority of the nine politicians on the Supreme Court decide it says. With one exception, they were all trained at Harvard or Yale to make an intellectual argument for the law requiring whatever served their purpose. So stop with the argument that there is some objective answer that they will search out. They have been trained to just make stuff up.
The fundamental problem here is that much of our privacy rights protection is based on security by obscurity
Nothing to see here, let's protest cell towers (Score:2)
Sure would be a shame (Score:2, Funny)
if everyone in town started buying up large amounts of paintball guns and kept shooting the cameras.
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RTC system (Score:2)
PII Definition (Score:3)
The state has access to technology via Flock that allows the tracing of an individual's activities, so by definition this puts license plates into the PII category. Which in turn means not only can people remove the license plates from their cars, but they should under the law. They can keep in their trunk and reveal it when a warrant is presented.
No privacy in public (Score:1)
A reasonable expectation of privacy in public (Score:2)
Being in public does not mean that a person does not have a reasonable expectation of privacy.
In Carpenter v. US [wikipedia.org], the court found that a warrant was needed for cell site records. This is complaint is in similar territory, and it does have a shot.
And just being in public does not eliminate the need for a warrant before a government search. In Katz v. US [wikipedia.org], the court found that Katz, who had a reasonable expectation of privacy while speaking in a phone booth, had his rights violated by the government when t
Social Data (Score:1)
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They also identify make, model, and year of vehicles, and if they have damaged fenders
Flock's don't. Heck, they don't even get the issuing state of the license plate. Flock sucks.
Most of their competitors (such as Genetec, or really anything using Vaxtor backend) do a much better job.
The framers didn't think of everything (Score:2)
It might be that allowing widespread surveillance is a bad idea while also being perfectly legal and not a violation of 4th Amendment. Whenever I think about peoples' "persons, houses, papers, and effects" I don't think of public roads.
Really. It's possible. People in the 1790s didn't know that ubiquitous surveillance could eventually be implemented. And they probably thought we'd maintain our laws as society (technology) evolved.
Flock Surveillance (Score:2)
I know bird law and flock surveillance is legal.
One vs N is a very different argument. (Score:2)
The 175 cameras effectively becomes a network whose existent is meant to stalk, track, and correlate information on whereabouts, that you can't get with a single data point. If 175 cameras, constantly tracking a