What do Darth Vader, the ACLU and some Democrats and Republicans have in common?
They hate Flock cameras.
Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Missouri, is launching an investigation into Flock Safety, demanding answers about how the company retains data and tracks vehicles.
Politicians aren't the only ones worried. The AI-powered surveillance cameras track, scan and preserve license plate numbers, feeding them into a searchable database that law enforcement and others can access. Citizens in blue and red states alike are protesting cameras that were installed to make them safer.
I'd expect pushback from Republicans, who tend to be wary about anything resembling a surveillance state. I'm more surprised by the resistance from the left.
Officials in St. Paul, Minnesota
– a notoriously liberal city where talk of defunding the police was common in 2020 – are removing their Flock cameras over concerns about how the data it collected was kept and who had access to it. Santa Barbara, California, dropped them, too, after public backlash.
In other states, fed-up citizens are taking matters into their own hands. Police in Chester County, South Carolina, arrested three teenage boys for allegedly cutting down and destroying a Flock camera. I don't condone vandalism, but who wants to bet this got some cheers from the neighbors? Similar incidents have hit Texas and Michigan.
Flock cameras speckled across cities are anti-American, and the risk of unwanted surveillance outweighs the benefit. Uncomfortable as it may be to admit, Americans' growing distaste for these cameras, and their resistance to them, is a good sign of a healthy society.
Are Flock cameras even solving crime?
Since Flock Safety launched almost a decade ago, the ACLU estimates, the company has installed about 120,000 license plate readers across the United States. (I never thought I'd say this about the ACLU, but I to respect its clever slogan, "Get the Flock Out.")
Flock cameras seem like a good idea in a crisis: finding a missing child or a criminal on the run. Flock Safety told CNN that its cameras have helped solve about 700,000 crimes a year. But a considerable amount of reporting, backed by data, undermines the claim.
The Atlanta Community Press Collective reports that the city has more than 5,000 automatic license plate readers, yet FBI data shows they’ve done little to help the Atlanta Police Department solve crime – and may have actually slowed it down.
Of course, there are success stories. Fortune reported that Flock cameras helped catch a man who opened fire at Brown University in December, killing two and wounding others. Police used access to more than 70 Flock cameras to track him down.
But Flock cameras have also been used to spy on people. A Florida police officer allegedly used his department's Flock access to stalk his estranged wife, making more than 700 unauthorized inquiries into her car over two years before he was finally arrested. A Kentucky police officer allegedly ran more than 2,000 Flock camera searches to track his ex-girlfriend; he was arrested, too.
The Washington Post reported that Flock was used “for unauthorized purposes” in dozens of cases where “rogue police" used the automatic license plate readers to spy on the women in their lives: wives, girlfriends, exes, even their exes’ new partners. How's that for solving crime?
Flock cameras present a significant privacy risk
Like many technological advances, Flock cameras are a double-edged sword. About 41% of people surveyed by Data for Progress have an "unfavorable" view of Flock surveillance cameras. Interestingly, Democrats and Republicans are about equally unfavorable.
Even Flock's CEO, Garrett Langley, has admitted as much, telling Fox News that society needs to find "compromise" between privacy and safety rather than prioritizing one over the other.
Flock cameras shouldn't be installed just because they're high-tech and purport to stop or solve crime, particularly if there are more privacy violations recorded than instances of resolved crime. If Flock cameras aren't as effective as they claim, their privacy and security costs outweigh the benefits.
I suspect some of the backlash stems from what Americans went through during the COVID-19 pandemic. If Americans learned anything from mandated lockdowns, it's just how quickly state and local governments stomped on our fundamental freedoms when given the chance, in the name of "safety" and the collective good.
I don't condone the vandalism, but I do applaud citizens from blue and red states, teenagers and Darth Vader wannabes, for looking today’s Big Brother in the eye and saying, “Not us; not today.”
It's an American response to a very anti-American product that reinforces a fundamentally American principle.
As Benjamin Franklin put it, "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." We are, after all, a free people in a free land.
Nicole Russell is an opinion columnist with USA TODAY. She lives in Texas with her four kids. Sign up for her newsletter, The Right Track, and get it delivered to your inbox.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Flock cameras are un-American. I'm glad folks are fighting back. | Opinion
