Flock shock rocks cop cam vendor as protests mount

A mischief-maker in a Darth Vader suit recently endorsed Flock at a city council meeting, and it has not helped the company's fortunes.

Around the US, citizens have been protesting and sometimes vandalizing the company's network of surveillance cameras.

And the advocacy has caused some governments to change course.

Government officials, commonly hesitant to second-guess law enforcement practices, have become concerned enough to question these mass surveillance practices.

US Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) on Wednesday wrote to Flock CEO Garrett Langley to announce an investigation of "Flock Safety's collection, retention, and dissemination of data gathered by its artificial intelligence cameras." Despite "Darth Vader's" comments last week at a San Diego City Council meeting about the need to "continue utilizing Flock technologies so that we can follow and surveil the rebel scum," a growing number of local governments in the US have been cancelling or choosing not to renew their contracts with Flock and other makers of automated license plate readers (ALPRs).

The Institute for Justice (IJ), a Virginia-based legal advocacy non-profit, on Wednesday published a new database that tracks the termination of local government ALPR contracts.

As of Wednesday, the database documents 93 local governments that canceled ALPR contracts.

The IJ, which is challenging ALPR use on Fourth Amendment grounds in Norfolk, Virginia and San Jose, California, previously published a database that documents police abuse of ALPRs, a topic addressed in Hawley's letter.

Incidents include romantic stalking, wrongful traffic stops and detentions, and other forms of misconduct.

"I think what's happened is that the American public has woken up to the mass surveillance that quietly arose around them," said Robert Frommer, senior attorney at IJ, in an interview with The Register.

"And they don't like it.

"It does seem to me that the rate of cancellations, the rate of public protest has increased over the past few months.

I think that's both due to more news attention being paid to the real life abuses of this technology, as well as the Supreme Court's recent decision in the geofence case," Frommer said.

In that case, SCOTUS ruled that cops need a warrant to grab location data.