It should give Foster City residents pause that the 20 Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs) the city has purchased and the Flock data collection system behind them are neither as passive nor as benign nor as secure as they may appear.
I have researched and written about ALPRs and specifically about Flock for Climate Redwood City Magazine. The promise is that the cameras save money, make people safe and solve crime. The reality is they also are evolutionary, taking society rapidly in a direction where loss of personal privacy may be permanent.
And they may not be that good at solving crime. Law enforcement cites the same handful of anecdotes about ALPRs helping find criminals, but has never reported statistics showing how effective they are.
What statistics there are haven’t budged significantly for decades. Nationally, vehicle thefts average about 3% to 4% of crimes. Only one of every five stolen cars are ever recovered and nine out of 10 vehicle thieves are never arrested, let alone charged.
As is obvious today, a viral pandemic has more to do with rising and falling crime rates than law enforcement activity.
Those facts must be weighed before committing to systems that collect multimillions of records on innocent citizens. San Mateo County had 674 vehicles stolen in 2018 and its pre-Flock expansion system of more than 70 cameras collected data on more than 6.7 million license plates. If the math holds true, that works out to more than 100,000 license plates read for every vehicle theft arrest.
What happens to the data? It takes close reading of Flock’s contract with the city, but it clearly allows data sharing with “Non-Agency End Users.” The contract is blasé in defining Non-Agency End User, listing only “schools, neighborhood homeowners associations, businesses and individual users.”
It does not have to specify the national Criminal Justice Information Services (CJIS) because the system collects huge volumes of data, from stolen vehicles to abducted children, is updated by local police agencies and is available to cops on the beat.
It is an alluring fallacy to believe that the company’s commitment to delete ALPR data after 30 days deflects the concern that the system can surveil, defined here as collecting and holding data in case it may one day be of use.
It sounds like the slate is wiped clean every month, but that’s not how it works. Only one day of data is deleted. Meanwhile, the system keeps collecting, recording and refreshing, 24/7/365, while it holds 30 days in memory. If it works as advertised. Some police agencies surveyed for my reporting did not know their ALPR vendors were keeping data for five years.
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There are at least two ways for an ALPR record to exist beyond 30 days or even become permanent in the inventory of more than 44 million now held by the federal law enforcement clearing house serving the Northern California region.
An officer may add it to a “hotlist” for investigation, which makes it available to the more than 15,000 law enforcement agencies on CJIS.
Or a citizen may list the license plate in an anonymous complaint, a Suspicious Activity Report (SAR), using the public website of the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC).
There are always hacks. The highly secret, highly secure NCRIC itself was hacked last year.
Foster City’s and Atherton’s purchase of Flock cameras alone boosted the number of ALPR cameras countywide by 50%, from about 80 to 120.
That increased the granularity, the resolution of license plate data by a huge amount. As these systems proliferate here, it will be a simple matter for law enforcement to pinpoint with great accuracy the location and activity of any citizen with an automobile.
It’s always useful to consider the other guy, to put oneself in another’s shoes, to judge fairness.
Flock advertises its system as a “gate,” with all that implies. It’s hard to see the problem if you’re inside the gate. You’re being protected from outsiders. You’re safe. You’re local. People know you.
Go outside the gate. Go to another community with its own gate. Now you’re an outsider. You are suspect. And your presence will be recorded.
Don Shoecraft is a journalist, editor, writer and author of four official histories, including the history of San Francisco International Airport.
Mr. Shoecraft – your letter provides food for thought. So the promise that cameras save money, make people safe or solve crime is not true? I would counter that if cameras can be used to find and track cars used in crimes, then that would save money because humans would be freed from doing the job of first finding the car and then tailing it. If camera systems solve crime, of which Sheriff Bolanos highlighted a few cases, then that result would make people safe. As for vehicle thefts not being recovered, maybe they’re not a priority, with an increase in other crimes taking precedence. Hacking is inevitable if enough people want the information. However, somebody first needs to find a way to monetize the info, because for now, personal and financial information sites are probably at greater risk than license plate data. Except maybe to ICE, which could use more help, especially in CA.
When I am not home I leave my lights on as a deterrent to any actions I am not familiar at home. I won't know if I was burgled or not but my lights worked probably deterring any trouble.. Such are these cameras a deterrent to any meanss helping prevent crime. I won't know if they work maybe so maybe not but they are there to discern any trouble possibly in my area. Good job PD Keep it up..
Mr. Shoecraft is probably not aware of the fact that his, and everybody else's whereabouts are already known or can be tracked. Besides our FastTrack devices, our smart phones provide that detailed information should the authorities want it. Both Google and Apple track their users which is apparently unknown to most. A license plate reading system, as the sheriff pointed out, is a high tech way to solve or prevent crime. With the proliferation of crime due to legislation sponsored by the likes of Weiner, which reduces most crime to a slap on the wrist, we need every tool available to us to counter this dangerous trend.
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(4) comments
Mr. Shoecraft – your letter provides food for thought. So the promise that cameras save money, make people safe or solve crime is not true? I would counter that if cameras can be used to find and track cars used in crimes, then that would save money because humans would be freed from doing the job of first finding the car and then tailing it. If camera systems solve crime, of which Sheriff Bolanos highlighted a few cases, then that result would make people safe. As for vehicle thefts not being recovered, maybe they’re not a priority, with an increase in other crimes taking precedence. Hacking is inevitable if enough people want the information. However, somebody first needs to find a way to monetize the info, because for now, personal and financial information sites are probably at greater risk than license plate data. Except maybe to ICE, which could use more help, especially in CA.
When I am not home I leave my lights on as a deterrent to any actions I am not familiar at home. I won't know if I was burgled or not but my lights worked probably deterring any trouble.. Such are these cameras a deterrent to any meanss helping prevent crime. I won't know if they work maybe so maybe not but they are there to discern any trouble possibly in my area. Good job PD Keep it up..
Mr. Shoecraft is probably not aware of the fact that his, and everybody else's whereabouts are already known or can be tracked. Besides our FastTrack devices, our smart phones provide that detailed information should the authorities want it. Both Google and Apple track their users which is apparently unknown to most. A license plate reading system, as the sheriff pointed out, is a high tech way to solve or prevent crime. With the proliferation of crime due to legislation sponsored by the likes of Weiner, which reduces most crime to a slap on the wrist, we need every tool available to us to counter this dangerous trend.
Dirk,
I hope everyone is sitting down and has their earthquake supply kit up to date. I agree with you.
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