To the editor:
Flock Safety is a private company specializing in camera systems that are contracted by both private and public entities to help detect and investigate criminal activity. Athens City and County both actively have Flock contracts that should not be renewed.
Cameras set up in public to record or monitor and detect crime are not a new thing and can be very successful in doing so. A common retort is “well, if you are not doing anything wrong, why worry?” The answer to that is another question: “doing something wrong according to whom?” Therein lies the problem.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which is an organization that specializes in defending digital privacy, free speech, and innovation has been able to obtain public records requests that revealed hundreds of searches through the Flock databases for data on protestors and minority groups.
While it is true that in a public area, anyone is free to record and take photos, there is a huge difference between a person recording another person or event in a public space for a moment-in-time, vs. a government entity or corporation tracking everybody at all hours of the day. It is then kept in a database that the people themselves being recorded can’t see. There is massive potential for abuse that outweighs any benefit.
We can already document criminal activity from personal video cameras monitoring their own property. I run a tech support business, and I have helped people set up these cameras. Now-a-days, you can’t commit a crime without five cameras watching you. It is true that the city can choose to tell Flock in their contract to retain data for very short periods of time, much less than the 30-day default retention policy, but the reality of it is that the data from these cameras is too valuable and too prone to abuse to be stored in someone else’s database, and not owned and controlled by the City of Athens.
Here is what the ACLU has to say: “The National ACLU has long been sounding the alarm of Flock’s aggressive approach to building a mass surveillance system unlike any seen before in American life. The company effectively enlists its customers, which range from homeowner associations to police departments, into a giant centralized government surveillance network. It’s not just those who sign the contract who find themselves caught under this web, either. Anyone who finds themselves in the path of one of Flock’s automatic license plate scanners is uploaded to this network as well. What, at one time, would have required probable cause and a warrant can now be done en masse with little to no public oversight.”
If you are interested in getting more involved in this issue, come to a StrongTowns meeting! The next one is April 12, when we will be discussing the topic of surveillance and privacy.
Shelby Elzinga
Nelsonville, Ohio