Reporting gets results. Or at least a response.
The CEO for Flock cameras has pushed back on recent reporting, including a Chronicle investigation, about the surveillance technology used by Houston police, saying it’s up to local law enforcement to decide how they use it.
Houston police have increasingly relied on the license plate recognition cameras to track tens of thousands of vehicles, often without justifying why they are doing so.
The majority of CEO Garrett Langley’s letter was aimed at reports about Flock cameras’ use in immigration- and abortion-related searches. But Langley did say the company would soon provide local law enforcement with an updated search function that would give officers a drop-down menu of reasons.
“Agencies should prescribe, in their LPR policies, how users should populate that search field,” he wrote.
Holly Beilin, director of communications for the company, said, even without the drop-down menu, officers can’t search the system without providing some reason for the search.
A Chronicle investigation found Houston police are using the cameras more than ever, logging tens of thousands of searches just last year and justifying their work less and less.
In rare cases, Houston police have run searches specifying “immigration” or listing a federal agency such as U.S. Customs and Border Protection as the purpose of the search. It’s not clear exactly what those searches are.
And in the letter, Flock disputed another report from a Texas media organization alleging that an officer used the camera system to search for a woman who had an abortion.
See here for the background. The response from Flock is the first link in the story and the excerpt above, so click over and read it if you want. “Providing a reason” is not the same as providing a warrant, and as those initial stories made clear, very often the reason provided was meaningless. As such, saying that officers have to provide a reason isn’t actually challenging any of the stories’ allegations. You can do better than that, Flock.
Really, what this needs is federal legislation that spells out exactly what tech like this can be used for and when, and what the limitations are in the absence of a search warrant. It’s more likely that I’ll be named Vice Pope than any of this happens under the Congress and President we have now, and Lord only knows how much damage can be done in the interim, but this is the ultimate solution. I dunno, maybe now is finally the time to adopt a strong stance in favor of privacy and laws to protect it as a campaign issue. It’s sure as hell the right thing to do. 404 Media, which did the initial reporting on this story and which has an update on what is happening in some other states, has more.