Flock has long pretended to be a simple automated license plate reader (ALPR) company, despite overwhelming evidence that its cameras can track a lot more than that. Now there’s a report that it has been developing new AI tools that can potentially locate people by how they drive, according to Wired.
The software was reportedly called Nightshift and is now going by the name OS Investigate. It draws from a network of cameras in 6,000 communities and logs the movements of drivers in those communities, Wired reports. This could be used, for instance, to find a witness to a crime by analyzing vehicle movements near where a crime occurred. Then, that information could be cross-referenced with police case files, 911 dispatch logs and commercial identity records to find the name, home address, relatives and even friends of the potential witness.
Wired says the tool can “search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.” In other words, an officer doesn’t even need a plate, name or a crime to begin searching. They just have to provide a location, a time and a pattern of behavior. The algorithm does the rest.
To that end, there’s a chatbot component. OS Investigate lets officers input prompts to help with these broad searches. Wired has shared numerous examples of the prompts in a module you can scroll through. Some of the prompts come pre-loaded and say stuff like “find me witnesses based on vehicles most seen in [neighborhood] during [last 14 days] during [daily timeframe.]” The officers would fill in the banks and submit.
It’s worth noting that this prompt doesn’t require that a user input an actual incident or crime. Flock says it’s testing the product right now with certain law enforcement partners and that the current capabilities “may not reflect” what it eventually sells. It also hasn’t disputed any of the aforementioned capabilities, instead just saying that this is a separate product from the license-plate reader technology.
“I don’t know how else to say this, but this sounds completely insane,” says Noel Pichardo, a former police officer who reviewed the software and related prompts for Wired. “I don’t know how anyone can argue against the idea that Flock literally tracks people.”
A current police officer who remains anonymous said that the witness-finding aspect makes him “slightly uncomfortable” but added that “as law enforcement, we need to use every tool available, in spite of what the ‘defund’ people say.” The independent security researcher Buchodi took a more tactful approach, noting that “there are a lot of innocent activities that could be flagged, even if it also might be quite useful for investigators.”
A Massachusetts police officer is facing possible dismissal and charges for allegedly misusing and improperly accessing information from Flock cameras, as an Ohio community calls for a pause in the use of Flock surveillance systems.
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Chad Marlow, an attorney with the ACLU, says that the danger lies in the idea that officers could basically go fishing for crimes. “The difference between a police officer saying, ‘Do you see any criminal patterns’ or ‘Find me criminal patterns’ is going to produce two different things,” he notes. “And I think the fact that they don’t seem to have any limitations on the prompts enables the police to almost lead the AI in what it does.”
This gets to one of the primary reasons people are so uncomfortable with Flock cameras. Police officers abuse them. There have been numerous reports that allege that cops have used the technology to cameras to spy on people and stalk ex-partners. This forced the company to introduce a number of safeguards to prevent abuse, like the ability to lock out flagged users and a requirement to attach case codes to searches. We have no idea what kind of safeguards would be needed to prevent abuse with the beta software that Wired took a look at.
This general unease with Flock and its products has fueled genuine and near-universal backlash. Several law enforcement agencies have severed ties with the company and citizens have begun taking matters into their own hands. Cameras have been vandalized, destroyed or stolen throughout the country. One Minnesota town found that all of its Flock cameras had disappeared overnight. The city’s police department will not be replacing the cameras.
