Senate Hearing Spotlights Flock Surveillance as “Canary in the Coal Mine”

PICTURED: U.S. Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO)

​Sen. Cory Booker: “We Are Out of Control”

The CEOs of four surveillance technology companies – Flock Safety, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada – declined Sen. Josh Hawley’s (R-MO) invitations to his Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Wednesday.

Their absence left the spotlight on Sen. Hawley’s star witness, Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida woman with a heart-rending story. Investigators used images from Flock cameras to trace her car while pursuing a fatal crash, then wrongly arrested her. She faced three counts of vehicular homicide and three counts of leaving the scene of a deadly crash. Isaacs spent 13 days in jail while facing charges that could have carried a life sentence.

Threat to Constitutional Rights

Sens. Hawley, Dick Durbin (D-IL), and Cory Booker (D-NJ) voiced concerns shared by the other witnesses about these Automated License-Plate Readers (ALPRs): that such pervasive surveillance poses a direct threat to Americans’ constitutional rights. Early in the hearing, Sen. Hawley noted that recording Americans’ movements enables the government to track our “patterns of life.”

“They could easily put these cameras in front of a gun store or gun show or a range, or you could put them in front of a pregnancy care center,” Hawley said.

Chad Marlow of the American Civil Liberties Union replied, “the only thing incorrect you said was ‘could,’ when it is ‘are.’”

Sen. Cory Booker added:

“We have gone way out of balance now … violating the average Americans’ sense of fundamental rights to privacy, speech, and to be moving without government surveillance … We are out of control for any government, state local or federal, to easily abuse the fundamental rights that we all assume we have a right to.”

Nor is government surveillance the only threat to Americans’ privacy. Benn Jordan, a cybersecurity engineer, described security vulnerabilities in surveillance cameras that could expose their feeds to outsiders. He testified that one pan-tilt-zoom camera could follow pedestrians and capture what appeared on the screens of their smartphones.

Law Enforcement’s Unexplored Culpability

The hearing also left room for a closer look at how police use ALPR leads. Sen. Hawley criticized the role of Flock’s system in Isaacs’s arrest. Flock cameras recorded her vehicle’s movements, but Florida Highway Patrol troopers drew the wrong conclusion from those images. Witnesses gave conflicting descriptions of a fleeing Durango, and a later investigation found paint evidence linking the crime to a maroon vehicle. Isaacs’s Durango was black. Photographs presented by her lawyer showed no damage consistent with a crash. Indeed, the car was in pristine condition.

Another witness, Sheriff Ross Teeple of Pinal County, Arizona, came to the hearing to set an example of local leadership. Despite the drug-trafficking challenges his department faces, Sheriff Teeple decided to cancel his department’s Flock contract. He explained: “If my deputies need a search warrant to put a physical tracker on a vehicle, where is the line for camera systems that build an identical, AI-driven map of a citizen’s life?”

One Piece of the Surveillance Mosaic

Perhaps Benn Jordan made the most profound point in the hearing, calling ALPRs the “canary in the coal mine.”

Other surveillance systems raise related privacy concerns. Section 702 of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act permits targeting of foreign threats abroad, but also collects Americans’ international communications. Government agents can search that data using Americans’ personal identifiers. Federal agencies also purchase commercially available personal data, potentially gaining access to revealing records without a warrant.

Combined with ALPR records and analyzed with AI, such data can easily help the government quickly assemble dossiers on Americans’ movements and private lives.

“We’ve got to find a way to protect and enforce the Bill of Rights and the basic personal liberties of every law-abiding citizen in this country no matter what the technology is,” Sen. Hawley said.
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We think the senator got that exactly right.

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