Colorado Man’s Flock Nightmare  Futurism and other sources report that Kyle Dausman can’t go anywhere in his truck without being swarmed by police. It’s all thanks to a glitch in the Matrix – er, in the Flock Safety camera surveillance system – used by authorities across the state of Colorado. Seriously, this is one of those stories that would be a lot funnier if it were about an average guy named Klaus who lived in the East German police state circa 1986. After stopping him a couple of times, the Cherry Hills Police Department quickly realized that a dubious clerical strategy was responsible for flagging local resident Dausman in the statewide Colorado Crime Information Center database. Because the Centennial State, like others, uses both zeroes and letter Os in license numbers: “Sometimes the data entry will be for both" versions of a plate when an arrest warrant is issued, Cherry Hills police chief Jason Lyons told Denver’s KUSA. A clerk filing a warrant in another county apparently did exactly that in Kyle Dausman’s case, entering both the “0” and “O” versions of the actual offender’s tag, according to the Cherry Hills chief. He also noted, pointedly: "It wasn't a mistake.” Poor Dausman just happened to be the guy with the innocent-yet-incorrect tag sequence. "Everywhere in the state, every time I pass a camera,” laments the victim, “they get alerts in their car that I'm in the area." He justifiably worries for his family’s safety as well as his own. Colorado should order its clerks to stop conflating zeros and Os. Why does the state – like many others – continue to put innocent people in harm’s way? This could be fixed with one executive order from the governor. At least the local police department in Cherry Hills fixed the flag in its local database. But beyond that, Dausman is on his own, and largely without recourse according to the details of various reports: The Colorado Crime Information Center hotlist still shows him as a wanted man, and no one is sure who has the actual authority to address the situation. All of which is to say nothing of actual reform (which lives only on best practice wish lists for now). Dausman’s experience, writes Al Landau for Gadget Review, is emblematic of a fundamental problem with large-scale, big-data-powered surveillance systems like the Flock Safety networks popular across Colorado: “Flawed data produces harmful results, regardless of camera sophistication.” A process, he says, that amplifies bad data practices, potentially turning them into “major personal nightmares.” Like a coal miner’s canary, this story warns not just about the anti-privacy plate-reader industry, but about the dangers of public partnerships with Big Tech that fuels the growth of the modern surveillance state. In the meantime, privacy-loving pro-Fourth-Amendment citizens who want to keep tabs on Flock’s invasive alliances with law enforcement can do so on an advocacy site appropriately called DeFlock. Comments are closed.
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