Police Chief: “A Nice Curtain of Technology” We’ve long followed the threat to privacy from the proliferation of automated license plate readers (ALPRs). Now the Institute for Justice has filed a lawsuit against the Norfolk, Virginia, police department for its use of this Orwellian technology. More than 5,000 communities across the country have installed the most popular ALPR brand, Flock, which records and keeps the daily movements of American citizens driving in their cars. Norfolk is an enthusiastic adopter of Flock technology, with a network of 172 advanced cameras that make it impossible for citizens to go anywhere in their city without being followed and recorded. Flock applies artificial intelligence software to its national database of billions of images, adding advanced search and intelligence functions. “This sort of tracking that would have taken days of effort, multiple officers, and significant resources just a decade ago now takes just a few mouse clicks,” the Institute for Justice tells a federal court in its lawsuit. “City officers can output a list of locations a car has been seen, create lists of cars that visited specific locations, and even track cars that are often seen together.” No wonder the Norfolk police chief calls Flock’s network “a nice curtain of technology.” The Institute for Justice has a different characterization, calling this network “172 unblinking eyes.” Americans are used to the idea of being occasionally spotted by a friend or neighbor while on the road, but no one expects to have every mile of one’s daily movements imaged and recorded. The nefarious nature of this technology is revealed in the concerns of the two Norfolk-area plaintiffs named in the lawsuit.
“If the Flock cameras record Lee going straight through the intersection outside his neighborhood, for example, the NPD (Norfolk Police Department) 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 […] “Lee finds all of this deeply intrusive. Even if ordinary people see him out and about from time to time, Lee does not expect and does not want people – much less government officials – tracking his every movement over 30 days or more and analyzing that data the way the Flock cameras allow the NPD and other Flock users to do.”
“As a healthcare worker, Crystal is legally and ethically required to protect her clients’ privacy,” the filing states. “She also understands that her clients expect her to maintain their confidentiality … If she failed to live up to those expectations, her business would suffer.” Both plaintiffs are concerned another Flock user, perhaps a commercial entity, might misuse the records of their movements. They are also worried about “the potential that Defendants, Flock users, or third-party hackers could misuse her information.” No warrants or permissions are needed for Norfolk officers to freely access the system. The Institute for Justice was shrewd in its selection of venues. Norfolk is in the jurisdiction of the federal Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals, which in 2021 struck down the use of drone images over the city in a case called Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department. “The Beautiful Struggle opinion was about a relatively, comparatively, crude system, just a drone that was flying in the air for 12 hours a day that at most had a couple of pixels that made it hard to identify anyone,” Institute for Justice attorney Robert Frommer told 404 Media. “By contrast, anyone with the Flock cameras has a crystal-clear record of your car, a digital fingerprint that can track anywhere you go. The police chief even said you can’t really go anywhere in Norfolk without being caught by one of these cameras.” The consistent principle from the Fourth Circuit’s precedent should make it clear, in the words of the Institute for Justice, that tracking a driver “to church, to a doctor’s office, to a drug-abuse treatment clinic, to a political protest,” is unconstitutional. Comments are closed.
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