11 mysterious cameras were watching Florida drivers. Officials don’t know who owns them
Florida’s St. Lucie County recently discovered that its residents were being surveilled by mysterious cameras installed in secret and unconnected to any state or local agency.
The county found the cameras after it voted to uninstall its own fleet of Flock automated license plate readers, which are used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies to track drivers’ movements on roads around the country.
When the county took an inventory of the Flock units in operation, it located 14 unpermitted cameras pointed at its roads. Local law enforcement agencies claimed three of the unauthorized devices, leaving 11 mystery cameras unaccounted for, according to a report by The Washington Post. The county sent out letters mid-month to revoke permissions for the cameras it could identify, and posted notices on the unpermitted cameras stating they must be removed within 30 days.
“Once that 30-day time frame is up—staff will begin safely removing the cameras or covering them to block their ability to record video,” St. Lucie County communications director Erick Gill told Fast Company. Gill clarified that 13 of the unpermitted cameras were on county streets, while one of the cameras was within the city of Port St. Lucie. The unpermitted cameras were first reported by local TV news station WPEC.
Like many communities, St. Lucie County recently voted to remove Flock cameras from its jurisdiction. “At this time we don’t know what other actors have access to our information . . . what Flock the company itself has access to, and who it’s sharing or selling its information to,” St. Lucie County Commissioner James Clasby said during a September 1 vote. Clasby’s warning was prescient, given the mysterious cameras later found secretly recording roads in the county.
Anti-surveillance backlash
In August, Florida’s Department of Transportation ordered law enforcement agencies to remove the cameras from state highways in light of concerns about misuse and data privacy. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis promised to pull the cameras in response to public outcry over the tens of thousands of license plate readers that power a real-time national surveillance network on American roads.
“These cameras that are out there now—who’s to say they’re only doing the license plate?” DeSantis said in a recent podcast appearance. “Now, they say that. I think it’s capturing people in their cars. I think it’s capturing way more information than they’re letting on.”
DeSantis also alluded to recent instances of law enforcement officials abusing Flock cameras. Last month, a police officer in Fort Pierce, Florida, was arrested after an investigation revealed he accessed Flock’s database 382 times to track the movement of an ex-girlfriend.
Like DeSantis, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott is another red-state Republican turning against Flock. Both Republicans have close ties with law enforcement, but the intense backlash against Flock and other surveillance systems like it is prompting even traditionally tough-on-crime Republicans to denounce the technology.
Politicians on the other side of the aisle agree. In Congress, Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Jeff Merkley (D-OR) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) just introduced a bill on Friday to ban Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers nationwide. The “Ban Flock Act” would prohibit federal agencies from deploying the surveillance cameras or sifting through their data. The legislation follows a recent proposal from Sen. Josh Hawley (R-MO) that would impose federal regulations on the vehicle surveillance cameras without blocking their use outright.
“At a time of growing concern about the unchecked power of artificial intelligence, Flock is eviscerating the very notion of privacy by installing tens of thousands of cameras in communities across America without their consent,” Sanders said.