I do not support the deployment of Flock cameras in Arlington. Flock cameras are presented as a public-safety tool designed to photograph vehicles and license plates to assist law enforcement with criminal investigations. However, the technology is capable of doing considerably more than functioning as a conventional traffic camera. Flock’s license plate reader (LPR) system records images of vehicles, license plates, vehicle characteristics, the time of observation, and the location of the camera.

Although Flock states that its cameras capture individual, point-in-time images rather than continuously recording video, the accumulation of these images creates a searchable record of where vehicles, and their owners, have traveled over time. Flock itself promotes the ability of its system to search for vehicles using characteristics such as make, model, color, and other identifying features when a complete license plate is unavailable. Identifying a person is not necessarily required to construct a detailed picture of that person's activities. A vehicle's repeated appearances at different locations and times can reveal patterns about where its owner lives, works, worships, or socializes.

The potential scope of information sharing is an additional concern. Flock states that customers control their own data and that sharing is not automatic. However, participating agencies can choose to share information with other law-enforcement agencies, including statewide and national networks. Flock therefore creates a technological infrastructure through which information collected locally can potentially become accessible across a much larger network of jurisdictions.

Flock claims it has implemented safeguards intended to address these concerns. The company states that access is restricted to authorized users, that individual searches are logged, and that searches are supposed to be associated with a legitimate investigative purpose. These safeguards are meaningful, but they do not eliminate my underlying concern: the government is collecting information about the movements of people who have not been accused of committing a crime.

My greatest concern about Flock cameras is the way this technology upends traditional understandings of privacy and the Fourth Amendment. The Fourth Amendment protects Americans against unreasonable searches and seizures and generally requires the government to establish sufficient justification before conducting certain searches. My concern is that widespread automated surveillance can reverse that traditional relationship between the government and the individual. Instead of beginning with a suspect and then obtaining information to investigate that person, the government can collect information about large numbers of people first and potentially search that information later when an investigation arises.

That order matters! A conventional traffic camera that photographs a vehicle because it has violated a traffic law is fundamentally different from a system capable of accumulating information in advance. Even if each individual photograph is taken in a public place, the aggregation compilation of those observations can reveal information that no single photograph could provide. The constitutional and ethical question is whether the government should be able to systematically collect, retain, search, and share records that can reveal a person's movements, and likely actions, over time.

The potential for this technology to become even more powerful also deserves consideration. Today, Flock emphasizes that its LPR system does not use facial recognition. But technological capabilities evolve. If vehicle recognition were eventually combined with reliable real-time facial recognition or other biometric technologies, the government could potentially move from tracking vehicles to identifying the people inside them, increasing the invasive nature of this technology.

For these reasons, I oppose the deployment of Flock cameras in Arlington. If Arlington continues to use Flock, I believe searches of the collected data should require judicial authorization, such as a warrant. At a minimum, residents deserve clear rules governing who can access the information and with whom it can be shared.

I believe Arlingtonians should not have to surrender their privacy merely because they drove on a public road. We must act now because protecting civil liberties requires establishing boundaries before surveillance becomes so pervasive that those boundaries are difficult to restore. For me, opposing Flock cameras is about maintaining the relationship between citizen and state; that citizens have a right to privacy by default and only after providing a justification can the state invade that privacy.