Here’s what it looks like when BINJ writes about Flock Safety, a surveillance company that provides Automatic License Plate Reader tech to law enforcement nationwide: The City of Boston entered a pilot contract with Flock in 2024, while the company’s cameras are also in Brookline and Watertown. In the latter, the lack of any real oversight process for funding the Flock equipment has caused a rift among city councilors and calls for reform from the public.
And now, here is a recent Boston Globe opinion on the same tech: License plate readers are a much less threatening form of government surveillance than, say, facial recognition software and cameras that scan crowds of people. … The whole reason the license plate is there in the first place is that drivers are not supposed to be anonymous and untraceable.
Huh? Let’s try that again. …
Here is the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy watchdog group, writing on the repercussions of pretending that ALPRs are only used by traffic cops: More than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock’s national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. … In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate.
And now back to the Globe again: Aggressive immigration enforcement may well be unjust and unwise … but it’s not generally illegal. ICE can lawfully detain and deport foreign nationals if they are living in the country illegally. So guardrails or no, it’s hard for me to believe that municipalities could actually prevent immigration authorities from accessing their Flock data if the feds really wanted it badly enough.
The writer, Alan Wirzbicki, continues: Ultimately, I suspect the only foolproof way for cities to prevent their camera data from helping ICE is to not have any cameras in the first place—and accept that as a result, police will have one fewer tool to do their job when there’s a car theft, a missing person, or a killer on the run.
Wow. Take a breath. And let’s return once more to BINJ, specifically our coverage of a city which actually did that: Cambridge removed 16 Flock ALPRs due to “data privacy and security” concerns. As a follow up, the city issued the following statement: “Concerns about Flock were substantiated when they notified the City that two cameras were installed by their technicians in late November—without the City’s awareness—following an outstanding work order that should have been canceled when the City originally deactivated the cameras and account.”
But as usual, the Fourth Amendment takes a back seat at the Globe. Wirzbicki writes: Days after Cambridge cancelled its contract with the license-plate reader company Flock over privacy concerns, the firm’s devices helped solve one of the region’s highest-profile murders in years. Police tracked down the man believed to have killed two Brown students in Rhode Island, and an MIT professor in Brookline, with the aid of the cameras.
And it gets even sillier: It’s not the first major crime the cameras have helped solve in New England … Still, left-leaning jurisdictions have turned against Flock cameras lately, concerned that the data they generate could be used … to find immigrants living in the country without authorization. … We’re all pretty lucky, though, that other cities in Massachusetts haven’t followed Cambridge’s lead, or else a serial killer might still be on the loose.
Nevermind that the serial killer in question, 48-year-old Claudio Manuel Neves Valente, was dead on arrival when authorities found him. Kind of like this Globe piece. Wirzbicki’s counting the Valente corpse nab as a win, though, and so is Flock Safety. They have his tribute posted right on their site. Because sometimes, when an outlet does the work of corporations and their media relations spin doctors, the company at the receiving end of the immodest knobber will republish the rubbish.
And so it is that even commoners who cannot typically consume whole articles behind the Massachusetts newspaper of record’s paywall can learn about how lucky we are to have an unaccountable surveillance apparatus mounting cameras anywhere they please regardless of whether community members consent.
