What Flock’s defenders are missing

Flock, the police-tech company behind a network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers across the US, announced platform changes last Thursday meant to prevent officers from using the system for illegal or illegitimate purposes, including stalking. The move follows a Washington Post investigation that identified 50 cases of officer misuse from Flock and competitors, often to stalk and harass women — one woman alleged her ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times, another was stalked by the chief of police with no one to report him to.

Flock's new practices include software that flags abnormal searches and a requirement that officers enter a criminal case number before running a search. But the company confirmed to MIT Technology Review that it does not verify those case numbers, so an officer can simply enter a bogus one. These loopholes don't address broader civil liberties concerns that Flock is turning a crime-stopping tool into a mass surveillance network, a backlash that has already led some cities to cancel contracts and some states to try to limit or ban license plate readers entirely.

Defenders argue that if the cameras help solve crime, the privacy trade-off is worth it. The author counters that this misses the more important question of what kind of crime-fighting system Flock has deliberately built — its choices about what information to collect, who can search it, how long to keep it, and how widely to share it set the terms of the bargain between security and civil liberties. A more robust system, for example, would require case numbers that match police department records, rather than accepting any number at face value.