Every day, George Orwell’s “1984” becomes more and more of a reality. Nationwide, Flock, the multi-billion-dollar venture-capital-backed data surveillance company, is building a dangerous nationwide mass-surveillance network — and they’re doing it one community at a time.
Flock’s surveillance tools use cameras to capture images of the vehicles driving on our roads and microphones to capture the words we speak outside in our neighborhoods. Then this private company uses AI-powered analytics to identify us and monitor our activities, and gives all that data to the government, even when nobody in the footage has been suspected of a crime.
Roanoke City Council has already approved more than 300 Flock surveillance devices to be deployed on our roadways. And recently, the council moved to pay even more money to Flock for a network of acoustic sensors that the company claims will detect gunshots.
How? Through tiny microphones, and just like cameras that track residents’ cars, microphones that constantly record sound are ripe for abuse.
Debates about how to protect public safety while respecting everyone’s fundamental freedoms are not new. Just think about the Patriot Act that Congress passed after 9/11, which opened the door to spying on American citizens and led to widespread racial profiling.
Today, the stakes of rapidly expanding domestic surveillance are still incredibly high. Flock technology hurts everyone because it tracks everyone.
It’s especially dangerous for people who are already being targeted by the government, like immigrants. The Trump administration has unconstitutionally targeted people who have never committed a crime, and even people who are on their way to becoming, or are already, American citizens. And authorities in other states have used or tried to use Flock surveillance to track people they suspect of nothing more than accessing lawful healthcare, like abortion.
Opposition to mass surveillance is not a left-right issue, as conservatives and libertarians have raised the same alarm. The right-leaning Cato Institute, as well as Republican legislators in states like Kentucky and Colorado, have raised the same concern: government should not be able to build a warrantless database of law-abiding citizens’ movements and later search it at will. This is a direct assault on our constitutional rights.
The technology our community approves today may look completely different in a year. Mass surveillance technologies are constantly adding new products or features, and the companies that make them can update their own tools without giving us public notice or letting communities engage in democratic debate.
For example, Flock announced last year that it will connect its system with commercial data brokers that maintain volumes of sensitive information about all of us. Combined with AI-powered analytics, Flock boasts that its system will allow police to seamlessly “jump from [license plate] to person.”
But license plate readers aren’t the only tool Flock wants to deploy on our streets. Now, Roanoke is considering expanding its contract with Flock for a system of acoustic sensors that will record human voices.
That means Roanoke residents’ First Amendment-protected speech will be monitored and recorded by both the government and a multi-billion-dollar corporation. Similar systems have been shown for years to be unreliable. Chicago police actually fired on a child who was setting off fireworks because a “gunshot detection system” indicated he had fired a gun.
We can’t let that happen in Roanoke.
Of course, we all agree that public safety is vital, and city council’s adoption of new technology is a well-intended effort to make sure our police have the resources they need to prevent and deter violence.
Companies like Flock know how important safety is to our communities: that’s why they make big promises about making us safe. The problem is, there’s just no evidence that these technologies reduce crime — and there is evidence that they record private information and abuse it.
Just look at Mecklenburg County, where WRIC reported that a police officer used law enforcement technology to spy on where his ex’s new boyfriend had been driving. Roanoke can only control what happens in Roanoke. But our rights and freedoms are eroding more quickly than many realize — one community like ours at a time.
We can’t afford to write a for-profit company like Flock a blank check. This surveillance company has already made billions of dollars off private citizens’ private data. We can’t let it add our residents’ data to its spoils.
Flock cameras are already on Roanoke roads. Council members shouldn’t add microphones to our communities. Roanoke can’t sign off on Flock’s vision of a sprawling, for-profit surveillance state that lets it profit off our data — data it should never have had access to in the first place. Roanoke City Council has an opportunity now to hit the brakes on more surveillance expansion, and it should take that opportunity, because where we drive and what we say is no one’s business but our own.
Sam Rasoul represents most of Roanoke in the House of Delegates. He is a Democrat.
