Video

Why Flock Is A Fourth Amendment Nightmare

Jonah Aragon

Jonah Aragon

— 10 min read

Transcript

Recording a car on a public road generally isn’t a Fourth Amendment search. But turning sightings from an entire camera network into a searchable history of where people travel may be. That is what Flock gives police the power to do, and I’m going to tell you about the Supreme Court decisions that I think make a powerful argument that Flock’s system enables routine Fourth Amendment violations on a huge scale.

Flock is an ALPR, or Automated License Plate Reader system. Its cameras capture images of vehicles and their surroundings, note the location and time, then compile all of those data points into a single interconnected database that can be searched by law enforcement later. Beyond vehicles, Flock and other ALPR vendors are also quickly expanding their systems into a whole host of surveillance use-cases, including providing video surveillance instead of still images, and building people search tools.

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If you need a summary of what Flock actually is to share with people unfamiliar with these systems, Privacy Guides published a concise summary of Flock and its issues on their Activism channel.

Now, I am not a lawyer, so I cannot provide you with advice about the law or how it may apply to you, but as a constitutional rights researcher I can tell you about some Supreme Court decisions and laws that are relevant to this whole Flock situation.

Our Right to Privacy

First, it’s important to establish what the Fourth Amendment protects. In 1967 there was a landmark Supreme Court case, Katz vs. United States, which established that the Fourth Amendment includes protections where a person has a “reasonable expectation of privacy,” and in the majority opinion written by Justice Potter Stewart, he noted that “what [someone] seeks to preserve as private, even in an area accessible to the public, may be constitutionally protected.”

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