California Cops Are Using Flock Cameras To Spy On A Small Wisconsin Village; New WILL Lawsuit Targets Warrantless, No Limits Government Surveillance

FLOCK/YOUTUBE

California Cops Are Using Flock Cameras To Spy On A Small Wisconsin Village:

Police departments with Flock camera fever are ‘addicted’ to the nationwide surveillance tool

Elm Grove is a quiet village of about 6,500 in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, 15 minutes from downtown Milwaukee. Like many municipalities, officials in Elm Grove recently caught Flock fever, installing six cameras that constantly surveil the village’s main streets.

Flock Group, Inc. is a tech company that has sold more than 120,000 cameras to governments, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and neighborhood associations. Marketed as ALPRs — automated license plate readers — they capture far more than plates: passing vehicles, pedestrians, backyards, and sometimes even the inside of vehicles.

Flock uploads the images and videos from its nationwide network of cameras into a massive location-history database. Flock’s AI tools create a “vehicle fingerprint” for each vehicle — every scratch, dent, bumper sticker, trailer, roof rack, or other noticeable feature is logged. Flock can document where you’ve been in the past month, where you are today, and even predict where you’re going in the future and who you’ll travel with. As with most emerging AI tech, the sky’s the limit.

What’s notable about Elm Grove’s six cameras is not that they exist, but that the cameras are searched more than a million times most months. But Elm Grove officers aren’t doing the bulk of that searching. Audit logs obtained through public records requests by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty show that Elm Grove’s officers only search their own cameras a few dozen times a month for minor local crimes, like traffic infractions.

The million searches come from other departments. Once an agency searches outside its jurisdiction, the searching is reciprocal. For example, if an Elm Grove officer runs a national search, then any of several thousand agencies can run a nationwide search that includes Elm Grove’s camera network. And now it happens all the time.

Records called “network audit logs,” maintained by every Flock customer, tell the story of these nationwide searches. Based on Elm Grove’s own records — and records from five other Waukesha County agencies — Gavin Newsom’s California Highway Patrol is by far the most frequent nationwide searcher of Flock cameras. CHP runs about 50,000 nationwide searches a month, querying images and videos collected from thousands of agencies. --->READ MORE HERE

New WILL Lawsuit Targets Warrantless, No Limits Government Surveillance:

WILL filed a new lawsuit seeking to prevent AI-powered government surveillance through Flock cameras without a warrant or valid warrant exception. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a coalition of taxpayers and Waukesha County citizens against 11 cities and villages in Waukesha County, plus the Waukesha County government.

The News: The Wisconsin Institute for Law & Liberty (WILL) filed a new lawsuit seeking to prevent AI-powered government surveillance through Flock cameras without a warrant or valid warrant exception. The lawsuit was filed on behalf of a coalition of taxpayers and Waukesha County citizens against 11 cities and villages in Waukesha County, plus the Waukesha County government. 

The Quote: WILL President and General Counsel, Rick Esenberg, stated, “Flock cameras essentially place the public under constant surveillance. Our lawsuit will not result in their removal or the end of their use. But it will ensure their use is accompanied by reasonable safeguards that will balance the needs of law enforcement with the public’s right to privacy.” 

WILL Managing Vice President and Deputy Counsel, Dan Lennington, stated, “When police track people through GPS, cell phone signals, or app usage, like Google, courts generally require a warrant. Flock cameras and Flock’s related AI-powered tools can track Americans even more accurately than those other tools. As technology advances, especially with AI, we must be vigilant to apply the Fourth Amendment to new products used by the government that track our daily movements.” 

Intrusive Cameras: Some cameras record movements near homes, like the one near WILL Plaintiff Haidinger’s backyard fence in Oconomowoc, or another one in Pewaukee Village, capturing everyone who enters or exits a trailer park. Flock cameras are installed near churches, gun stores, and Home Depots. Some cameras are installed outside of the seat of government, where citizens vote, seek licenses, and otherwise petition their government. There are over 120 cameras in Waukesha County, and over 1,500 in Wisconsin. Flock reports a network of 120,000 nationwide cameras monitored by over 6,000 law enforcement agencies. 

Tracking Movements: --->READ MORE HERE

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