On Flock Cameras and "What Do You Have to Hide"

The following is my personal opinion, based on published media reporting about automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems generally and Flock Safety specifically. I have no insider knowledge of Flock’s systems, architecture, or operations.

You want to be very careful with any “what do you have to hide” argument. That’s a fast slippery slope to tyranny. The value has to be balanced against the risks and the protection of civil liberties. I’m dubious when the government has trouble getting at certain data, such as under geofence warrant restrictions, and then turns around and contracts private parties to do bulk information collection at a scale previously reserved for the intelligence community.

I work in cybersecurity. In Internet-based security, access control and logging are very important. It gives us the ability to implement what is called non-repudiation, one of the five pillars of information security. This is the goals of cybersecurity to know who accessed a particular system, when, and to prove that it was not someone else. This is at tension with privacy, where for instance, we don’t want to leak which library books you are checking out.

In terms of privacy, in the United States we have a constitutionally protected right to be free from unreasonable search and seizures. And yet we have somehow decided in mass that things the government cannot lawfully do directly can be done indirectly by contracting with a private firm.

There have been reports of technical shortcomings with the Flock system itself. These aren’t thin, wide-eyed claims. Researchers have demonstrated local exploits requiring physical device access, Wi-Fi and cellular proximity attacks exploiting hardcoded network names and cleartext credentials, and at least one case of live camera feeds broadcasting to the open internet with no authentication at all. In the cybersecurity space we know most human made products at scale have vulnerabilities and have a CVE system in place to track them and see them fixed. However, what happens when the entire business model is at odds with a foundational societal issue and not being tracked from dawn to dusk in bulk.

And beside the technical issues, the weakest link is always the people (and now their AI assistants) who access the data and for what purpose. Reports of individual police officers running reports without authorization or running broad searches that exceed reasonable authorization are aplenty. Flock has responded to some of the criticism by reducing the default data retention period, and while that helps in part, it does not stop organizations from changing the retention back up, still running searches that should not have bene run in the first place, or bulk collecting by archiving data out of the system themselves.

And it does not take a science fiction dystopian mindset to understand that the authorities will lead with the saved kidnapping victim. What they won’t tell you about is the interview five years from now where an investigator says, “Mr. Smith, our notes indicate you were seen driving to [location] at 6:30 PM and then left for [location] at 6:42 PM. We also have a ping on your cell phone,” used as an intimidation tactic on some completely unrelated regulatory matter.

If that scenario does not give you pause, here is another one. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has been shown to have created a digitized database of approximately a billion firearm transaction records (Form 4473) that they were not authorized by law to build. I listened (on a YouTube feed) to Director Steven Dettelbach testify before Congress that ATF pays a vendor to strip the search function out of their PDF technology. That is a laughable security control for a database that should not exist by law. Secret databases can be cross-referenced. It is not far-fetched to imagine an administration change where a future President ordered the ATF to reclassify and then link up their database with the Flock data and take action against everyday gun owners, using evidence of their pattern of range trips. You may or may not live to see your day in court, and you may or may not receive Supreme Court relief, which would take many years even if you won in the end.

Privacy is important, and governments, policy, and law change. And once essential liberty is traded for a little comfort, it seldom can be bought back.

To me, the end is how I opened this. I am very uncomfortable with governments accessing data they cannot lawfully collect themselves without a warrant by requesting it from a private company that collected it beforehand in bulk.