Flock Caution

A tale of caution and HORROR of how not only Flock but emerging technologies such as Axon can be utilized warrantlessly and abused against law-abiding citizens to stampede over their Fourth Amendment protections under the noses of well-meaning local officials and even the police chiefs and sheriffs who are sworn with protecting and serving, We the People.

Even scarier, this rings home as it’s where I commuted day and night for my undergraduate degrees as I worked my way through college back in the 1980s—sometimes traveling twice a day between my hometown and Oshkosh to attend classes and migrating between part-time jobs as I worked my way through college while maintaining a full load.

What if, the OPD that I eventually interned for as a young Criminal Justice student, had decided to target me, that given my traffic patterns I must have had nefarious motives as no right minded kid would work multiple jobs day and night just to pay for his college courses on a similar pattern (day and night to maintain my goal of earning my four year degrees on time) and I was stopped, detained and God only knows what else?

Chilling, to be sure, and God bless these officials for having the moral fortitude to do the right thing but this begs the question: what happens when their citizens have to travel to a nearby city for a job, school, or whatever life necessitates them to do, and the adjoining jurisdictions have no such guardrails to protect versus abuses?

The set of possibilities and answers ought to mortify those who value freedom.

The following news excerpt details how this came about in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, but could just as well apply down here in our local community:

A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin caught Flock lying to his city council and killed the $8 billion surveillance company's contract less than a day after the council had approved it.

Here's how it happened.

“The night before, Oshkosh's council was set to renew its deal with Flock Safety, the license plate camera company backed by a16z and Tiger Global.

One council member asked the Flock rep a plain yes-or-no question. Does this system build a heat map of everywhere a specific car travels over time? Flock's rep said no.

The council believed him and voted 5 to 2 to renew. By the next morning, Chief Dean Smith's own officers had told him that answer was false.

So he pulled up the system himself. He watched it generate the exact heat map Flock had just sworn it couldn't make. Then he walked into an emergency meeting and said it out loud: "Because of this misrepresentation, I can no longer recommend Flock."

Understand what a heat map is, because it's the whole trick.

Flock sells cities a tidy little story. A car drives by, we snap a photo, we read the plate, that's all it is. But the same system can quietly average out where your car goes day after day and paint your routine onto a map. Not one snapshot at one corner. Your pattern. Where you sleep, where you work, where you keep going back and how often.

A Flock employee later admitted on the record that the software does exactly that.

The only reason Oshkosh caught it was one skeptical question and a police chief who bothered to check the answer. The vote to rescind was 7 to 0. Unanimous.

Oshkosh got one honest answer by accident. Congress can make it the rule.”

Governor DeSantis just mandated a moratorium on state highways across Florida. I, as one small voice, applaud such a bold initiative, but it is only a first step.

Such a move could serve as a catalyst for others and for Congress to finally enact similar measures. The erosion of our civil rights has reached a crescendo and the time is now to make our concerns known to our other representatives and sheriffs.