Liam Glavin ‘27 (he/him) is a government major from Falls Church, Va. He loves running, reading and spending time with friends and hopes to instill values of political and civic engagement across the community. Contact him at ljglavin@wm.edu.
The views expressed in the article are the author’s own.
If you’ve been around campus recently, you may have noticed license plate cameras positioned around high-traffic roadways. These are Flock cameras. They are the artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers at the center of a national debate around privacy.
Students at the College of William and Mary have voiced their opposition to Flock operating on campus. They’ve raised privacy concerns, arguing the technology is overly intrusive. Students have also voted on a referendum, overwhelmingly calling for the College to end its relationship with Flock.
The College has acknowledged student privacy concerns about Flock, but it declined to stop using the technology. The Office of Public Safety has repeatedly argued that Flock is an effective public safety tool. They’ve disclosed two campus crimes solved with the technology during a public safety conversation, arguing the cameras make our community safer. Williamsburg police have also responded to community concerns about Flock, indicating they plan to continue using the technology.
When privacy concerns are brought up about these cameras, I’ve heard a recurring response from those in favor of implementing Flock. They claim Flock is not intrusive. These individuals argue that the cameras are merely license plate readers, statically recording public-facing vehicle information.
During last semester’s moderated public safety conversation, Chief of the William and Mary Police Department Don Butler made a similar argument. He claimed that anyone could simulate a Flock camera by sitting on the side of the road and recording license plates that drive by.
“What I can tell you is what we’re talking about [with Flock] is [recording] license plates and vehicles in public,” he said. “If you drove here tonight and parked out there, any number of people in this world can do that same thing right now.”
Flock cameras are not just license plate readers. They are a far more sophisticated surveillance technology that allow police to meticulously track the location of any vehicle that may cross through a given jurisdiction. While Flock records license plate and vehicle information, its cameras also document exactly where and when your car drives past a camera. Flock’s hotlist system allows police to take this information and put together the precise locations and timestamps of how a vehicle may interact with multiple cameras across a designated area.
Given that we are talking about dozens, and sometimes hundreds, of these cameras being accessible to police, Flock allows law enforcement to paint fairly detailed movement patterns for any vehicle based on its interactions with its cameras. This kind of tracking is not that dissimilar to police placing a continuous GPS tracker onto every single vehicle that may drive through a community, and law enforcement can do all of this without a warrant.
While Virginia law limits the use of this kind of tracking to situations where law enforcement have reasonable suspicion of a crime being committed, actual enforcement is mostly left up to individual police departments. We can see this lack of external enforcement embodied in a recent Virginia State Crime Commission report. According to the document, numerous police departments across Virginia report ignoring our statewide laws regulating Flock cameras and have faced zero serious repercussions for doing so.
The real limits on how police can use the Flock system appear then to mostly be those they place on themselves. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this kind of ineffective outside control on the use of Flock technology has led to rampant abuse.
There have been dozens of recorded instances of officers around the country using Flock to stalk ex-wives, former girlfriends and other romantic interests. Police have also used the system to pervertedly surveil a woman traveling across state lines to get reproductive healthcare. Law enforcement officers have even gone so far as to utilize Flock technology to stalk immigrants, with information from Flock cameras being accessible to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. These recorded instances illustrate how Flock has been and can be used as a creepy mass surveillance and stalking tool by law enforcement officers around the country.
Flock has responded to the rampant police abuse of its technology by shortening its standard data retention period to seven days and rolling out a universal audit assistance tool. This is a farce. States and localities still have the freedom to extend their data retention periods. There have also been no independent evaluations of Flock’s audit assistance tool and whether it can genuinely curb police abuse. Flock’s audit system is furthermore inherently simple to circumvent, with law enforcement officers easily able to lie about why they are requesting data.
Flock supporters tend to deflect when I bring up these arguments. They usually point to my phone and argue the tracking from it is not dissimilar to Flock. I argue Flock is far more intrusive. Our phone location data is not readily accessible inside police departments around the country with seemingly lackluster protections that aren’t enough to stop law enforcement from using it for perverted purposes or to stalk people.
I have had multiple discussions with the Office of Public Safety and Williamsburg police about Flock. I have also looked over their audit policies dealing with use of the system. While I do see them operating in good faith, I don’t think that’s enough.
When an AI-powered mass surveillance system such as Flock is as easy to abuse as we’ve seen across the country, the question of this abuse coming to campus or our community is not a question of whether it will, but when. All it takes is one person. All it takes is one officer to break policy and use these cameras for the perverse and creepy pursuits that they were seemingly designed for.
The College and local police need to do more to assure students and Williamsburg residents that this AI-powered mass surveillance technology won’t be and isn’t being abused in our community. If they don’t, I don’t see how their continued use of Flock is conducive to building trust.
