Watching the Watchers: Former NSA Employee on Flock Cameras: “Real and Palpable Damage to Citizenry”

On April 8, the Board of Scarsdale Village, New York, approved a $2.1 million contract with Flock Safety to bring mass camera surveillance to its community.
 
Many residents of Scarsdale, the wealthiest suburb in the United States, were disturbed by the apparent contravention of the Board’s rules, giving no advance notice or allowing any public comment before voting 6-1 vote to approve the contract. Many of its residents are deeply troubled about the implications of Flock Safety camera surveillance, which enables AI-powered license plate readers to follow residents in their daily travels.
 
Jessica Burbank followed this story on Drop Site News, writing: “Flock is a $7.5 billion surveillance technology company, operating in over 5,000 communities across 49 states. Flock has a proven playbook to expand through securing local government contracts, often behind closed doors.”
 
Burbank reports on the public comments of Scarsdale resident Charles Seife, a former employee of the National Security Agency, who said:
 
“The system that Scarsdale wishes to implement is extremely dangerous … The records are kept for several weeks. At the very least, they allow retroactive surveillance. These systems are immensely popular with politicians and law enforcement, even though they do real and palpable damage to the citizenry …
 
“We're creating that database so that we can always do that for anyone, that you're constantly tracking people's movements. You have that system in place so that you don't need to articulate the suspicion before you're gathering that on someone, before you're actually trying to tag someone with wrongdoing. When you have that system there, all someone has to do is say, I don't like that person. And then you've got that surveillance already established.”
 
Seife later told Drop Site News: “Freedoms don't come back and privacy doesn't come back, and we are taking these irreversible steps so blithely for no real reason.”
 
Another Scarsdale resident, Josh Frankel, said: “The way I see it, it is not a matter of if this data will be abused and misused, only a matter of when and by whom.”

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