Flock Safety sought to ease growing alarm over its controversial mass surveillance tools Wednesday ahead of a Senate hearing on its technology.
In a letter to Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Missouri), chair of the Subcommittee on Crime and Counterterrorism, the company said it had tightened rules around how law enforcement officers can search its vast databases of images of people in their vehicles.
The company’s chief legal officer said Flock is now requiring subscribers to provide a specific reason for their queries. Previously, subscribers could enter any justification they wanted in a “free-text” field.
Hawley said this made it difficult to hold people accountable for unjustified searches — in some cases, he said, subscribers had simply entered “search” or “LOL.”
Trending
“Flock admitted that until very recently, there were basically no curbs or restrictions on which of these subscribers, so to speak, could search their databases, what they could do with the images, how long the images were kept, or what other uses they were put to,” Hawley said at Wednesday’s hearing.
In the hearing, titled “Always Watching: Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network,” Hawley and other lawmakers warned about the potential for AI-powered camera networks operated by Flock and other technology companies to violate the constitutional and privacy rights of millions of innocent Americans.
Flock alone has deployed 120,000 cameras on roads in every state but Hawaii, vacuuming up huge quantities of data on motorists. Other companies have deployed similar devices.
“If you haven’t heard of Flock,” Hawley said, “all I have to say is, Flock has probably heard of you.”
Hawley invited the chief executives of Flock, Axon Enterprise, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada to testify. All declined.
“Obviously they’re nervous about being on camera,” Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) quipped at the beginning of the discussion.
The hearing showcased bipartisan interest in regulating Flock’s cameras and similar technologies, with Democrats and Republicans broadly agreeing that, in the wrong hands, the devices could be used to target everyone from gun owners to people seeking abortion care.
Privacy experts from the American Civil Liberties Union and the Institute for Justice testified, along with a cybersecurity engineer who has exposed vulnerabilities in Flock’s systems and Lindsey Isaacs, a Florida motorist who was wrongfully accused of causing a fatal car crash based partially on Flock data.
An Ariziona sheriff who recently canceled his county’s contract with Flock also spoke, calling for “clear, statutory boundaries” on the technology, which he said encroaches too deeply on American’s constitutional rights.
“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?” Sheriff Ross Teeple testified.
At the hearing’s conclusion, Hawley displayed a quote from Flock CEO Garrett Langley saying Americans had “already given up the traditional sense of privacy” in exchange for greater safety.
“Do you want to make that trade-off? Are we going to live in a world where we may all have to suffer the deprivations that Ms. Isaacs did because some robot decides we were at the scene of a crime?” Hawley asked. “I suggest to you that this viewpoint is the problem.”
Author
