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Home My WebLink AboutItem 1NFrom:Brad Anderson To:City Clerk Subject:E-Public Comment - Agenda Item: 1-N (opposed) Date:Monday, September 25, 2023 9:00:31 PM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. September 25, 2023 City of Palm Springs City Council Council Chamber - City Hall 3200 E. Tahquitz Canyon Way, CA. 92262 Attn: Clerk of the Board - CityClerk@palmspringsca.gov 760.323.8204 Re: Written letter to be entered in the Public record and made available for the September 26, 2023 (5:30PM) City Council meeting - Agenda Item: 1-N (ALPR proposal) Dear current City Council members, This letter is in opposition of the Implementation (approval) of agenda Item: 1-N (ALPR service contract) from the company Insight Public Safety, Inc. Please be aware that having this agenda Item: 1-N (ALPR service contract) location within the City Council's meeting agenda "Consent Calendar" would be in direct conflict with (Best practices protocols) and requirements of the State of California (SB-38) for the legal Implementation of Automated License plate Recognition cameras (ALPR). The Citys staff report took advantage of the American Civil liberties Union (ACLU) "On-line" out dated documents (2016-2018 - "Making Smart Decisions about Surveillance") by making that publication part of the Citys staff report of agenda Item: 1-N. That action of City officials to include that out-dated ACLU publication with a title page that would potentially misslead the reader to believe that the ACLU recommend the Palm Springs proposal combined with the large volume of that ACLU report/opinion could be deceptive and misleading to the reader. It's very unusual and unique not to have "Any" documents in the Citys staff report that would detail the equipment design and operational efficiency (manufacturer details) of the proposed equipment (Flock ALPR's). It was stated that the proposed ALPR system wouldn't be deployed in Palm Springs neighborhoods. Also its unclear if those ALPR's would only be installed on already existing infrastructure. If new stand-alone poles would be required or requested for the new fixed ALPR's - those "Poles" would/should be reviewed by City approval Architecture design board/commission. Along with the New proposed ALPR's that to date haven't been seen (any documents/picture's) to have them adapt within the City's image and not be an invasion uncivilized and unsightly visual pollution next to City streets plus being a potential Public safety hazard increasing 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N visual obstructions along side traffic streets/sidewalks. In conclusion, the expansion of new ALPR cameras would potentially be a grave invasive intrusion on anyone that would be monitored with those devices (Flock ALPR system). The risk of third-party and potentially dangerous established City/County/State officials missuse of that system would be devastating to the community. Such continuous data of every vehicle movements would be to valuable to political elements throughout the State of California and Nationally not to have it retained and reviewed and potentially misused by those groups. Palm Springs is a tourist destination - having a extremely high number of visitors from other States that would have differently constructed license plate on their vehicles. The Citys staff report declined to supply any details on the capabilities of Flock ALPR's to "read" other States/Countries license plates? It reasonable to consider that the City of Palm Springs along with other Coachella Valley Cities and Riverside County have conspired to potentially collect and monitor vehicle traffic movements throughout the region by it's citizenship. Opposed Agenda Item: 1-N Sincerely, Brad Anderson | 37043 Ferber Dr. Rancho Mirage, CA. 92270 Ba4612442@gmail.com Cc: 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Brenda Pree To:Cassandra Edney; Evelyn Beltran; Brent Rasi Subject:FW: Public comment received from ACLU Date:Tuesday, September 26, 2023 3:30:27 PM -----Original Message----- From: Christy Holstege <Christy.Holstege@palmspringsca.gov> Sent: Tuesday, September 26, 2023 2:41 PM To: Brenda Pree <Brenda.Pree@palmspringsca.gov> Subject: Public comment received from ACLU By approving an ALPR system, the City of Palm Springs would place immigrants and their families, as well as the larger Black community and communities of color at serious risk. ALPR systems collect and store license plates of cars that pass-through the cameras’ fields of view. After being matched to dates, times, and location, law enforcement and companies can discern where individuals work, live, associate, and visit—even without speaking to the DMV. Further, ALPR systems are easily misused to harm minority communities. For example, police have used license plate readers to target Muslim Americans by spying on mosques, and officers have monitored the license plates of LGBT community members. As with other surveillance technologies, police deploy license plate readers disproportionately in poor areas, regardless of crime rates. Flock in particular risks creating a network of surveillance throughout the city through private-public partnership. These privacy concerns take on a new urgency given that ALPRs often allow ICE to access license place information held by these systems. This can be done even without the Palm Springs Police Department’s cooperation or participation, as was recently the case in Ontario and other departments in the state. Once data is shared with LEAs or databases that communicate with ICE, it can become available to the federal agency. ALPR system failures have dangerous consequences and may result in liability for the City, even beyond SB54. For example, blind reliance by San Francisco police on these readers led to the wrongful detention of a black woman at gunpoint, triggering a multi-year civil rights lawsuit. Finally, we encourage the city to listen to community calls to cut, rather than increase, the amount of public resources it spends on the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department. The alternative isn’t to tolerate crime, it’s to invest in community so everyone can thrive. In conclusion, we urge you not to execute an agreement with Flock Safety or any other provider of ALPRs, but rather to prioritize the needs and safety of the community. [1] “You Are Being Tracked: How License Plate Readers Are Being Used to Record Americans’ Movements,” American Civil Liberties Union, July 2013, https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdf (https://www.aclu.org/files/assets/071613-aclu-alprreport-opt-v05.pdf).; “Automatic License Plate Readers,” Electronic Frontier Foundation, https://www.eff.org/sls/tech/automated-license-plate-readers (https://www.eff.org/sls/tech/automated-license-plate-readers). [1] Adam Goldman and Matt Apuzzo, With cameras, informants, NYPD eyed mosques, Associated Press, Feb. 23, 2012, https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the- news/2012/with-cameras-informants-nypd-eyed-mosques (https://www.ap.org/ap-in-the-news/2012/with-cameras-informants-nypd-eyed-mosques). [1] Michael Powell, Sari Horwitz, Toni Locy, Lt. Stowe’s Sudden Fall From Grace, Wash. Post, Nov. 30, 1997, https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/30/lt-stowes-sudden-fall-from-grace/a6ac37f2-57d2-47fb-b6da-0f8f6a45dde8 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1997/11/30/lt-stowes-sudden-fall-from-grace/a6ac37f2-57d2-47fb-b6da-0f8f6a45dde8). [1] Alvaro M. Bedoya, The Color of Surveillance, Slate.com, Jan. 19, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/what_the_fbi_s_surveillance_of_martin_luther_king_says_about_modern_spying.html (http://www.slate.com/articles/technology/future_tense/2016/01/what_the_fbi_s_surveillance_of_martin_luther_king_says_about_modern_spying.html); Alex Campbell & Kendall Taggart, The Ticket Machine, Buzzfeed News, Jan. 26, 2016, https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine (https://www.buzzfeed.com/alexcampbell/the-ticket-machine). [1] See e.g., Russell Brandom, Exclusive: ICE is about to start tracking license plates across the US, The Verge, Jan. 26, 2018, https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions (https://www.theverge.com/2018/1/26/16932350/ice-immigration-customs-license-plate-recognition-contract-vigilant-solutions). [1] Id. [1] Privacy Impact Assessment, Acquisition and Use of License Plate Reader (LPR) Data from a Commercial Service, DHS/ICE/PIA-039(a), Dec. 27, 2017, https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-ice-lpr-january2018.pdf (https://www.dhs.gov/sites/default/files/publications/privacy-pia-ice-lpr-january2018.pdf) [1] Matt Cagle, San Francisco – Paying the Price for Surveillance Without Safeguards, ACLU of Northern California, May 22, 2014, https://www.aclunc.org/blog/san-francisco-paying-price-surveillance-without-safeguards (https://www.aclunc.org/blog/san-francisco-paying-price- surveillance-without-safeguards). [1] “Deputies Sued After False ALPR Hit Leads to Guns-Out Traffic Stop of California Privacy Activist,” Tech Dirt, February 20, 2019, https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190217/08240241618/deputies-sued-after-false-alpr-hit-leads-to-guns-out-traffic-stop-california-privacy- activist.shtml (https://www.techdirt.com/articles/20190217/08240241618/deputies-sued-after-false-alpr-hit-leads-to-guns-out-traffic-stop-california- privacy-activist.shtml). [1] Auditor of the State of California, 2019-118: Automated License Plate Readers: To Bett er Protect Individuals’ Privacy, Law Enforcement Must Increase Its Safeguards for the Data it Collects (2020), available at Automated License Plate Readers To Better Protect Individuals’ Privacy, Law Enforcement Must Increase Its Safeguards for the Data It Collects (ca.gov) (https://www.auditor.ca.gov/pdfs/reports/2019-118.pdf) ; see also 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N Dave Maass and Hayley Tsukayama, California Auditor Releases Damning Report about Law Enforcement’s Use of Automated License Plate Readers , Electronic Frontier Foundation, February 13, 2020, https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/california-auditor-releases-damning-report-about-law-enforcements-use-automated (https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2020/02/california-auditor-releases-damning-report-about-law-enforcements-use-automated) . [1] The ACLU’s surveillance reform resources are available online: Making Smart Decisions About Surveillance: A Guide for Community Transparency, Accountability & Oversight , ACLU of Northern California, https://www.aclunc.org/smartaboutsurveillance (https://www.aclunc.org/smartaboutsurveillance) ; Community Control Over Police Surveillance , ACLU, https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/community-control- over-police-surveillance (https://www.aclu.org/issues/privacy-technology/surveillance-technologies/community-control-over-police-surveillance) . Christy Gilbert Holstege, Esq. Councilmember District 4 City of Palm Springs 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/1/9 Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week The technology has drawn criticism, with some questioning whether the increased use of surveillance technology creates a trade-o between personal privacy and public safety. BY MARK TALKINGTON ● PUBLIC SAFETY ● SEPTEMBER 18, 2023 Listen to this article 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/2/9 PSPD Lt. William Hutchinson speaks to the audience Monday during a forum held at the police training center. Looking to address potential concerns about the use of license plate reading technology in the community, leaders with the Palm Springs Police Department (PSPD) took their case straight to area residents Monday evening. What they found was an audience that was varying degrees of both curious and concerned. The 90-minute forum at PSPD’s Training Center, attended by roughly 30 people, featured presentations on the department’s drone use and the amount of military equipment available to the Desert Regional Special Weapons and Tactics Team (SWAT), comprised of ocers from the Palm Springs, Cathedral City, and Indio police departments. The bulk of the time, however, was spent on the nal topic — license plate reading cameras. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/3/9 Up for discussion was a looming request by the department to purchase 15 license plate readers that would be permanently mounted at intersections here, including those at the city’s entrances. Funding for the cameras, estimated at $50,000, would come from the department’s technology budget, which was previously approved by the Palm Springs City Council. The cameras, made by Flock Safety, record not just license plates, but also a vehicle’s color and other features, alerting authorities when vehicles involved in suspected crimes, or carrying suspected criminals, have entered their community. In areas where multiple cameras are mounted, police can track a vehicle’s movements, aiding in the location of possible suspects. The technology has drawn criticism similar to that surrounding Ring doorbell cameras, with organizations such as the American Civil Liberties Union questioning whether the increased use of surveillance technology creates a trade-o between personal privacy and public safety. While the cameras could face similar questions if their purchase is approved here, they would not be the rst being used both in Palm Springs and throughout the Coachella Valley. Several area cities have installed them, as have private neighborhoods and homeowners’ associations. Two similar mobile camera units have been used by the PSPD for more than a decade, and many private businesses have the cameras deployed in their parking lots. The fact that the cameras are already in use here may have come as news to some of those in attendance Monday evening. But it wasn’t new information for some Palm Desert residents who attended the meeting. They said they have been trying to voice their concerns about the technology to local elected leaders and law enforcement agencies for years. “This is all very fear-based,” said Barbara Wasserkrug after listening to the presentations by lieutenants William Hutchinson and Gustavo Araiza. “It appears to be relatively severe and part Local reporting and journalism you can count on. Your Email Address Subscribe Subscribe to The Palm Springs Post 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/4/9 of the militarization of the police.” “Is the end game to create a police state?” she asked. “It appears like you’re on that path. It’s pretty severe what you’re talking about this evening.” Both Hutchinson and Araiza took issue with accusations the department was spreading fear, pointing out that much of the weaponry and technology available to their department is used to de-escalate situations. “We don’t go kicking in doors,” said Araiza . A Flock license plate reading camera is seen installed along a roadway. The drone, which has been deployed roughly 150 times since being purchased in the fall of 2022, has helped locate missing hikers and aided police as they monitored large community events, such as Pride. Recently, it was deployed to help alert people living in area washes that major ooding was expected during Tropical Storm Hilary. “We don’t weaponize the drone,” Hutchinson assured the audience. “We don’t use facial recognition. Both of those are prohibited under state law. …We’re not just cruising around neighborhoods with it like a patrol car would be.” As for the license plate cameras, whose funding will be discussed during the next City Council meeting on Sept. 26, Hutchinson agreed it would be hard to establish a relationship between their 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/5/9 use and a decrease in crime. In the end, he said, that’s not the goal. “There’s no part of this that says we can lower the crime rate with these cameras,” Hutchinson said. “But it can help us solve crimes faster. “You can say it’s fear-based, but violent crime does occur in Palm Springs.” Your voice: Have something to say about the use of license plate reading cameras in Palm Springs? You can write city leaders prior to the Sept. 26 meeting using the form located here. You can also register to speak by following the instructions here. Author MARK TALKINGTON Mark rst moved to the Coachella Valley in 1994 and is currently a Palm Springs resident. After a long career in newspapers (including The Desert Sun) and major digital news websites, he founded The Palm Springs Post in 2021. Related Articles 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/6/9 Palm Springs to receive portion of more than $250 million in state grants aimed at crime prevention BY KENDALL BALCHAN ● PUBLIC SAFETY ● SEPTEMBER 14, 2023 PSPD plans to use its share of the funds for its “comprehensive crime prevention model” that targets retail and vehicle theft, including the theft of… ‘I don’t want you to be paranoid. But I am asking you to be prepared’: Lieutenant addresses brazen robberies, including one here BY MARK TALKINGTON ● PUBLIC SAFETY ● SEPTEMBER 7, 2023 After a 'smash and grab' was reported downtown last month, tensions are understandably high. PSPD Lt. William Hutchinson oered advice for both local business owners… Efforts underway to assist those impacted by Hilary, help campaign for prevention of future road closures 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/7/9 Palm Springs Area Events TUE 26 Free Acting Class The Actor's Lab | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 PSUSD Board of Education meeting District Administra... | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 Palm Springs City Council Regular Me… Palm Springs City H... | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 The Roundtable - HIV/AIDS Survivors Zoom | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 Keisha D at V Wine Lounge V Wine Lounge | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 Just Bloom, New Work by Michael Gri… Rubine Red Gallery | Palm Springs, CA TUE 26 VillageFest Board Meeting Palm Springs City H... | Palm Springs, CA TUE26 WED27 THU28 FRI29 SAT30 SUN1  See all events See all events  Add your event Add your event BY MARK TALKINGTON ● PUBLIC SAFETY ● AUGUST 27, 2023 The eorts include those by Riverside County to collect reports of damage, those of a local museum to collect funds, and those of one Palm… 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/8/9 Support The Palm Springs Post The journalism in The Post is free and always will be. 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Subscribe to The Post Receive vital news about your city in your inbox for free every day your@address.com Subscribe 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Police explain need for license plate readers at forum; funding request expected to come before City Council next week ⋆ The Pal… https://thepalmspringspost.com/police-explain-need-for-license-plate-readers-at-forum/9/9 ABOUTNEWSLETTERADVERTISINGCONTACT USLOGIN Support Us Copyright © 2023 Valley Voice Media | Powered by Indiegraf Media Privacy Policy | Subscription Agreement | Terms of Use You can unsubscribe at any time. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Coachella rejects license plate readers, cites privacy and Chad Bianco https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license-plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586…1/5 COACHELLA Coachella rejects license plate readers over privacy issues, concerns with Chad Bianco Published 6:30 a.m. PT Aug. 18, 2023 Updated 9:10 a.m. PT Aug. 18, 2023 The Coachella City Council has rejected a years-long effort by the Riverside County Sheriff's Department to install about 70 automatic license plate reader cameras in the city. Some in the council majority that voted against the proposal during a late July meeting cited privacy concerns and the need for funding other community efforts. Members also cited Sheriff Chad Bianco's recent alignment with a group headed by presidential candidate and Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis that supports new immigration enforcement to address what it calls the "border crisis." The council's debate and questions from The Desert Sun prompted the sheriff's department to reveal this week that it has stopped sharing with police in other states data on where specific cars are spotted. That's a practice that a digital-privacy group has said violated California law. Sheriff's Lt. Randy Vasquez presented the proposal for installing dozens of cameras, provided by a company called Flock Safety, to the council on July 26. The proposal would have cost the city about $240,000 initially, and about $210,000 annually. When some councilmembers raised privacy concerns in their ensuing debate, Vasquez assured them the sheriff's department does not share data from the cameras with departments across state lines. But a previous public records request by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a privacy advocacy group, showed the sheriff's department has shared data from the license plate readers, known as ALPRs, with hundreds of agencies, including many in other states. Christopher Damien Palm Springs Desert Sun 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Coachella rejects license plate readers, cites privacy and Chad Bianco https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license-plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586…2/5 When told of those findings by The Desert Sun, no councilmember said they were aware the sheriff's department has in fact shared the data — including with police in Ohio, Indiana, Oregon, Arizona, Georgia, Alabama and Florida — and were doing so in the years since the proposal was first considered in 2021. When asked for this story if he was aware of the scope of the department's sharing practices before the meeting, Vasquez said he asked the department's ALPR program administrator and was told that the department stopped sharing across state lines "several months ago." But he maintained the practice was legal and still an option. "Although there is existing law that prohibits California law enforcement agencies from sharing information for the purposes of abortion investigations or prosecutions, there currently is no law that prohibits general sharing of ALPR data with out-of-state agencies," Vasquez wrote Wednesday. It's a claim the Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU disagree with, and the focus of a lawsuit against the Marin County Sheriff's Department last year — a case that department resolved out of court by agreeing to stop out-of-state sharing with other police, including federal immigration agencies. "We're asking departments to stop sending plate data collected in California to other states, because it's the law and those other states don't have the privacy safeguards we have here," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz about Riverside County agencies in June. ‘Big Brother’ and immigration policy Coachella councilmembers were not, in any case, unanimously persuaded by Vasquez's proposal, voting 3-2 against it. The city first considered the cameras in 2021, and councilmembers have repeatedly voiced mixed views about them since. During the July meeting, councilmembers Denise Delgado and Frank Figueroa voted in favor of installing the cameras, saying public safety benefits outweigh privacy concerns. Karina Quintanilla, mayor pro tem of Palm Desert, attended as a guest and spoke during public comment in support of the proposal saying the system has worked well for assisting investigations in that city. She said Wednesday that she had not been aware of the sheriff's department's broad sharing practices. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Coachella rejects license plate readers, cites privacy and Chad Bianco https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license-plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586…3/5 Councilmember Stephanie Virgen was one of the three who voted against the cameras, saying she preferred to spend funds on community projects. Mayor Steven Hernandez and Mayor Pro Tem Neftali Galarza said the cameras' ability to capture images of vehicles, in addition to license plates, could enable police and others who are provided with data the ability to track the movements of specific residents. "This idea of having a comprehensive record of everyone's comings and goings, it's — it feels weird to me, it feels Big Brother," Hernandez said during the meeting. "What's next? A facial reader?" Galarza said his concern increased after Bianco's alignment, announced in June, with DeSantis' immigration platform. "The fact that our county sheriff has joined DeSantis' anti-immigration coalition is also very worrisome to me because the idea that now the head of this agency (who) aligns himself with the ideology of a DeSantis has access to undocumented immigrants' daily commute," Galarza said. He later added that the department's leader's political moves appear to be at odds with Coachella's resolution to be a sanctuary city in 2017. The vote against the cameras and council concerns over Bianco's ties to DeSantis were previously reported by KESQ. DeSantis, a Republican, announced his platform on immigration after touring the international border in Texas in June, stating that lethal violence might be necessary in response to his concerns about drug trafficking. Bianco was one of about 90 law enforcement leaders across the nation to join a coalition in support of DeSantis' border platform. Immigration advocates, like the Inland Coalition for Immigrant Justice, blasted Bianco for his allegiance with what it called in a June news release "an anti-immigration task force." Why sheriff stopped sharing data When Galarza brought up his concern about data sharing during the July meeting, Vasquez said Galarza shouldn't worry. "For the camera system itself, we don't share out of state, " Vasquez said. But Galarza's concerns proved to not be unfounded. Earlier this year, the Electronic Frontier Foundation identified 70 California law enforcement agencies that do share ALPR data with 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Coachella rejects license plate readers, cites privacy and Chad Bianco https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license-plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586…4/5 out-of-state agencies. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department is among them. EFF started the investigation over concerns that people could be prosecuted in other states for traveling to California to seek abortions. Many police departments, like in Palm Springs, stopped sharing in response to EFF's work. EFF and several chapters of the ACLU in California sued then-Marin County Sheriff Bob Doyle claiming a 2015 state law, SB 34, and the California Values Act, made such out-of-state sharing illegal. The Riverside County Sheriff's Department had, until Vasquez's comments this week, been silent on the claim of illegal data sharing, with department spokespeople not responding to previous requests for comment from The Desert Sun. They stopped sharing, Vasquez said Wednesday, because it wasn't useful, not because of claims it wasn't legal. "As these questions relate to our deployment and use of Flock Safety ALPR technology, we stopped sharing direct access to our data, by default, with non-California agencies several months ago, primarily because there was no significant investigative benefit to the Riverside County Sheriff’s Office for sharing access with agencies with limited nexus, and after careful consideration of community concerns," Vasquez said in an email. Asked about what Vasquez told the Coachella council, EFF told The Desert Sun the sheriff's department has not reported that it stopped sharing ALPR data with out-of-state agencies. And the department did not respond to The Desert Sun's request for its most recent data sharing report. Cameras spread across valley, county Bianco has been steadily growing the department's inventory of ALPR cameras in recent years. In addition to cameras being operated in all of its Coachella Valley contract cities, the department purchased in 2021 about 260 cameras for use in the county's unincorporated areas. They refused to release to The Desert Sun any further details about where the cameras were installed and why those locations were selected. The department's data released last year shows its cameras captured some 76 million images from January through October 2022. Police departments in the cities of Desert Hot Springs, Cathedral City, Indio and Palm Springs all operate their own ALPR cameras. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:32 PM Coachella rejects license plate readers, cites privacy and Chad Bianco https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license-plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586…5/5 Asked Tuesday about Vasquez's statement that the department does not share its data out of state, Galarza again emphasized his concerns about Bianco's alignment with DeSantis and how the allegiance influences how he utilizes the department's taxpayer funded tools. "The sheriff has agreed to use his resources to assist Governor DeSantis," Galarza said by phone. "Will he use these too?" Hernandez urged the department to release its most recent data sharing report to clear the record for the public. All of the other Coachella Valley cities that contract with the sheriff for police services have ALPR cameras, he said, and need to know if that data is being shared. He added that the council needs accurate information when it's considering such expenditures. "We're contracting with them," said Hernandez by phone Tuesday. "You told us you don't share, but other information is showing you do. What's the truth?" Both Galarza and Hernandez said they are confident they made the right decision to vote against the cameras regardless of what past and future records show the sheriff's department does with license plate reader data. "We trust our police officers to do the right thing, but we know data gets used in ways it isn't intended to be," Hernandez said. "This is about privacy and trust. I voted accordingly. We did the right thing." Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:33 PM How California license-plate cameras could aid abortion prosecutions https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2023/06/28/how-california-license-plate-cameras-could-aid-abortion-prosecutions/70357602007/1/4 LOCAL How license-plate cameras in Coachella Valley could aid abortion prosecutions elsewhere Data from the readers has been shared across the country, internal police records show Published 7:00 a.m. PT June 28, 2023 Police in large swaths of California, including three departments in the Coachella Valley, have widely shared automated license plate reader data that could enable states with severe abortion restrictions to prosecute people who come here for abortions, several civil rights groups say. Christopher Damien Palm Springs Desert Sun 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:33 PM How California license-plate cameras could aid abortion prosecutions https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2023/06/28/how-california-license-plate-cameras-could-aid-abortion-prosecutions/70357602007/2/4 The Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the ACLU chapters of Northern and Southern California sent letters to about 70 departments in 22 California counties demanding they cease sharing detailed driving profiles with out-of-state agencies. The groups say the practice violates California laws meant to protect reproductive health access and safeguard location privacy. The local departments that have shared data are Palm Springs police, who said they have stopped; and the Riverside County sheriff and Desert Hot Springs police, both of which did not answer questions. The advocacy groups emphasized that sharing such information with agencies in states that have restricted abortion access, after Roe v. Wade was overturned last year, could aid in the prosecution of abortion seekers and providers elsewhere. Last year a California law was established to prohibit law enforcement agencies in the state from assisting outside enforcement or investigations of legal abortion access in California. And another from 2016 had already limited how departments could share license plate reader data outside the state. The advocacy groups claim that widespread ALPR data sharing violates those laws. "We're asking departments to stop sending plate data collected in California to other states, because it's the law and those other states don't have the privacy safeguards we have here," said EFF Senior Staff Attorney Adam Schwartz. It's a fight that organizations like EFF have been engaged in for years when it comes to ALPRs, which they argue capture vast swaths of data from unsuspecting motorists. An ALPR is a computer-controlled camera that photographs all license plate numbers in view and records location, date and time information, and sometimes drivers and passengers. Departments that operate cameras in certain jurisdictions can choose to share their ALPR data with others. EFF has long held that such data can threaten the civil liberties of immigrants, protestors, religious minorities and more. "ALPRs invade people’s privacy and violate the rights of entire communities, as they often are deployed in poor and historically overpoliced areas regardless of crime rates," said EFF Staff Attorney Jennifer Pinsof. “Sharing ALPR data with law enforcement in states that criminalize abortion undermines California’s extensive efforts to protect reproductive health privacy.” 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:33 PM How California license-plate cameras could aid abortion prosecutions https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2023/06/28/how-california-license-plate-cameras-could-aid-abortion-prosecutions/70357602007/3/4 Although abortion is legal in California, states are trying to block people from making plans to travel here to get one. In Idaho, a new law criminalizes helping a pregnant minor leave the state for an abortion elsewhere, NBC News reported. The civil rights groups sent the letter in May to seven departments in the county: the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department, and the police departments in the cities of Beaumont, Desert Hot Springs, Hemet, Menifee, Murrieta and Palm Springs. These departments had shared ALPR data across the nation, and some with departments in states with abortion restrictions like Alabama, Idaho, Mississippi, Oklahoma, Tennessee, and Texas. Palm Springs police agreed to stop sharing the data outside of California after being sent the letter, a department spokesperson said by email. The sheriff's department didn't respond to questions, and the Desert Hot Springs Police Department declined to comment for this story. "Palm Springs can be proud and relieved that their local police have ended out-of-state sharing," Schwartz said. The California State Auditor in 2020 completed an audit of four law enforcement agencies in the state to learn more about how ALPRs are being used. It found that three of the departments were widely sharing images with hundreds of others around the nation. State law allows local police to share ALPR data with other public agencies, but requires them to inquire about why the other agency is seeking to share the data. The audit found that the departments were regularly not meeting that requirement. EFF submitted public records requests with the various departments it sent the May letter to. The records they received in response show that the Riverside County departments generally share ALPR data with hundreds of other departments across the nation. The records also shed rare public light on the massive ALPR collection efforts of the Riverside County Sheriff's Department, which provides police services to five Coachella Valley cities. The sheriff's department has been steadily growing the size of its ALPR arsenal in recent years, and declined to provide detailed information about the necessity and placement of about 260 cameras purchased for use in the county's unincorporated areas in late 2021. The department reported capturing some 76 million license plate detections across its cameras from January through October 2022, up from 61 million in 2021, records released in response to the letter show. The records also show the extent to which the department has 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:33 PM How California license-plate cameras could aid abortion prosecutions https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2023/06/28/how-california-license-plate-cameras-could-aid-abortion-prosecutions/70357602007/4/4 deployed cameras in cities that contract with it for police services, such as 57 cameras in San Jacinto, 52 cameras in Temecula and 45 cameras in Palm Desert. The La Quinta City Council voted earlier this year to install 69 of the cameras. There are none in Coachella, though some council members have proposed installing them. Information for Rancho Mirage and Indian Wells — both also policed by the sheriff — was not in the data obtained by the privacy groups. Christopher Damien covers public safety and the criminal justice system. He can be reached at christopher.damien@desertsun.com or follow him at @chris_a_damien. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 1 Fast-Growing Company Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System By Jay Stanley March 3, 2022 A new and rapidly growing surveillance company called Flock Safety is building a form of mass surveillance unlike any seen before in American life. The company has so far focused on selling automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras to homeowner associations and other private parties, as well as to police departments. But it has done so through a business model that effectively enlists its customers into a giant centralized government surveillance network — and the company is aiming to expand its offerings beyond ALPR to traditional video surveillance, while also expanding its AI machine vision capabilities. In this paper, we look at this company’s products, business model, and future aims, and how those embody some of the more worrisome trends in surveillance technology today. Flock is not the only company engaging in mass collection of ALPR data; Motorola Solutions and the company it acquired, Vigilant Solutions, also run a giant nationwide ALPR database, and have recently made a bid to compete with Flock’s strategy. But we focus here on Flock because it is a new, up-and-coming company that industry analysts say is poised for major expansion both geographically and in the kinds of technology it provides. A public/private license-scanning network A startup founded in 2017, Flock has grown rapidly, riding two major trends in the security camera industry: a move to cloud services, and video analytics. The company recently attracted $300 million in venture capital investments, which industry analysts say is “unparalleled in the video surveillance industry” and will put the co mpany “in a position to expand aggressively over the next few years.” The company makes grandiose claims about its mission, which it says is to “eliminate nonviolent crime across the United States.” 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 2 Flock says its fixed cameras have been installed in 1,400 cities across the U.S. and photograph more than a billion vehicles every month, and its ambition is to expand to “every single city in America.” Flock also has a partnership with the body camera company Axon to provide mobile ALPR devices for police vehicles. Flock’s cameras allow private customers like homeowner associations as well as police customers to create a record of the comings and goings of every vehicle that passes in front of the cameras. But the service goes well beyond that; it feeds that data into a centralized database run by Flock. As the company tells police: If you know the specific license plate in question, use FlockOS to get a detailed report of the suspect vehicle’s history over a given timeframe. Use FlockOS’s local and national search network to find the suspect vehicle across state lines, including up to 1 billion monthly plate reads. All this is included, for FREE, for any Flock Safety customer. Flock not only allows private camera owners to create their own “hot lists” that will generate alarms when listed plates are spotted, but also runs all plates against state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). When a camera scores a hit against one of those databases, law enforcement receives an immediate notification. As Flock CEO Garrett Langley explained in 2020: We have a partnership through the FBI that we monitor all of the cameras for about a quarter of a million vehicles that are known wanted — either stolen, it’s a warrant, it’s an amber alert. And so at any given time — about 20 times an hour — we will notify local authorities. … In January we reported just over 67,000 wanted vehicles across the country. This giant surveillance network might also be used by immigration authorities to deport people, as is Motorola’s private ALPR database. Asked by Vice News whether Flock could be used for such purposes, Langley said, “Yes, if it was legal in a state, we would not be in a position to stop them,” adding, “We give our customers the tools to decide and let them go from there.” All of this means that those who purchase Flock cameras are effectively buying and installing surveillance devices not just for themselves, but for the authorities as well, adding their cameras to a nationwide network searchable by the police. The closest thing to this model we have seen before is the doorbell camera company Ring, which also raises many troubling issues. But Flock is working (and enlisting its customers to work) directly as an agent of law enforcement even more than Ring. It says it is “working with” over 700 law enforcement agencies and , according to Langley, At the end of the day, we view the police department as our actual end-user. They’re the only ones that can make an arrest. So neighborhoods, apartment complexes, motels, hotels, malls, hospitals — they might pay for the camera, but more often than not the only ones that are actually looking at it are the police . … Most of our software is actually running in the patrol vehicles. So if there’s a crime, or there’s a stolen car that drives by, 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 3 we’re notifying the nearest officer, typically within a few seconds from when that happens, and they can turn on the blue lights and go get ‘em. As with Ring, police departments appear to be coordinating with Flock in ways that are unseemly for agencies serving the public. Vice reported that it obtained emails showing that “Flock works closely with police to try and generate positive media coverage, improve the ir PR strategy, and … ‘bring more private cameras into the area.’” Flock has also helped write police press releases, Vice found, and officers appear in Flock promotional videos. Emails obtained by the video surveillance industry research group IPVM show local Texas police referring homeowners associations and other neighborhood groups to Flock, advocating for the company at community meetings, providing the company with neighborhood contact lists, and introducing other police chiefs to company sales managers. In 2020, Langley told a police audience, When you partn er with Flock … you’re also getting a new ability to do public outreach. … Every single day we’re working with our chiefs and their command staff to host community events, to build awareness, and more importantly, build a common trust and relationship between your constituents and the police department. And the end result is more cameras at no cost to you. The company has run into trouble for pushing police departments to embrace its technology without getting the approval of the communities those departments serve. It has also created conflict in some communities where its cameras have been proposed or adopted, and sparked well-founded concerns that the technology might have a disproportionate effect on communities of color and other vulnerable communities. Centralization of data When a neighborhood association buys a Flock camera, it is basically contributing a piece of equipment to a new nationwide law enforcement surveillance infrastructure that, as Slate put it, means even “small-town police departments can suddenly afford to conduct surveillance at a massive scale.” Flock can gather the information captured by its cameras around the country into its own centralized database because it is a cloud-based service provider rather than a mere seller of hardware. That database is available to more than 500 U.S. police departments. As a business matter, this allows the company to benefit from self-reinforcing network effects. But if Flock cameras become as widespread and densely placed as the company hopes, law enforcement will gain the ability to know the detailed movements of virtually any vehicle for as far into the past as that data is held. That would create enormous risks of privacy violations and other abuses and would have significant legal implications as well. And the risk of abuse by government is all too real. Unfortunately, this country has a long tradition, extending up to the present, of law enforcement targeting people not because they’re suspected of criminal activity but because of their political or religious beliefs or race. That includes quasi-private surveillance. There are also many documented instances of individual officers abusing police databases, including ALPR databases. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 4 We have long had concerns about the dangers posed by hybrid public-private surveillance practices — but Flock threatens to take that to a new level. In the past we have noted that distributed private surveillance cameras are less of a threat to civil liberties than centralized surveillance networks — but also warned that if all those private cameras were connected to a cloud, the effect would be to re-centralize them. By pulling all the data recorded by its customers — including its police customers — into its own centralized servers, Flock not only creates an enormously powerful private-public machine sweeping up data on Americans’ activities, but puts itself at that machine’s center. It’s bad enough when law enforcement engages in such mass surveillance, but to have such data flowing through a private company creates an additional set of incentives for abuse. For one thing, there are no checks and balances on the use of this database. The lack of proper checks on the behavior of law enforcement is well established — and studies suggest improper use of ALPR in particular may be widespread. Nor are there adequate checks on Flock. The company says it only keeps ALPR data for 30 days, but no laws require them to honor that promise. The company controls an enormous data set that could probably be monetized in various ways — and while the company is growing fast now, boom times never last forever. What will future managers do if the company hits tough times, the spotlight has moved on from their controversial role, and they’re tempted to reach for revenue they’re flushing out of their database every 30 days? How might they use their tool against competitors, or against workers, say, if they find themselves fighting a union battle? We’ve already had a glimpse of what can go wrong with cloud surveillance providers in the case of the company Verkada, which was hacked and found to be secretly tapping into its customers’ cameras. Indeed, think what present or future leaders or employees at Flock could do with that power — or what they could be pressured or forced into doing by unscrupulous government officials. We know that Ring gave workers access to every Ring camera in the world, together with customer details. Other companies offering cloud services have also run into controversy from granting such access, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. Those companies accessed people’s data to improve their AI models, which are always hungry for real-world data. Flock likewise says that its cloud architecture “allows us to continue to improve the software and deploy enhancements out to our cameras in real-time.” Of course, the authorities and the company are not the only possible sources of abuse; there are plenty of reasons to worry about nosy homeowner association board members and the like using this tool to snoop on the comings and goings of their neighbors (and their neighbors’ friends, family, lovers, etc.). Neighborhood administrators are not subject to ev en such training and oversight as is applied to the police, and don’t generally know how to impose access restrictions, if they even think of doing so. It is true that all vehicles are required to display license plates, and in our past work on ALPRs we have written that license plate readers would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against legitimate hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly. But we also noted that a proliferation of cameras and widespread sharing allow for the creation of intrusive records of our comings and goings, create chilling effects , and open the door to abusive 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 5 tracking. And the scale of what Flock is doing goes far beyond what was contemplated when ALPRs first arrived on the scene. Accuracy problems ALPR is also bedeviled by accuracy problems. In tests, IPVM found that Flock’s ALPR worked well overall compared to other products — but nothing is perfect, and even a low error rate can produce tragic consequences given the scale of Flock’s operations . In particular, IPVM found that Flock’s system misidentified a license plate’s state about 10 percent of the time. Given that state misidentification errors have led to innocent people being terrorized by the police as presumed dangerous criminals, that is a real problem. The FBI’s NCIC database that Flock checks plates against is notoriously inaccurate, and people have been badly harmed by inaccuracies in that database, including through ALPR cameras. Federal law requires that government agencies maintain records used to make “any determination about any individual” with “such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.” That doesn’t seem like too much to ask — but when it comes to its NCIC database, the FBI felt compelled to exempt itself from that law. One detective also told colleagues on LinkedIn that “today we almost did a felony stop on a stolen vehicle that wasn’t actually stolen,” and reminded them that when dealing with stolen cars they must “remember to remove the vehicle if it’s recovered.” A system dependent on busy and sometimes sloppy officers to remember to carry out such follow through is also a recipe for trouble. Another source of potential error is that Flock’s cameras download fresh hit lists from the NCIC only twice a day, which creates the possibility that the removal of a plate from the hotlist will cause out-of-date alerts to be sent to law enforcement for up to 12 hours until the next update. The accuracy problems with ALPRs have led to many incidents in which people have been subject to traumatic treatment by law enforcement because of errors. And when law enforcement comes running on high alert because technology has raised an alarm, those most likely to be subject to such treatment — or worse — are Black people and members of other vulnerable communities for whom even the most casual encounter with law enforcement can turn deadly. When the only people running plates were police officers doing so manually and only when they personally witnessed a suspicious vehicle, errors in law enforcement databases like the NCIC occasionally had bad effects. But when plates are being run 500 million times a month, the consequences of errors in those databases become greatly magnified. (For more on the problems ALPR devices present see the ACLU’s 2013 report and this 2017 Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the technology.) 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 6 Beyond license plates Flock does not plan to remain limited to ALPR cameras. Langley, its CEO, told IPVM that the company is working on ideas for traditional camera products and sees “a ton of opportunity in the traditional [surveillance] market.” Already, the photos taken by Flock’s ALPR cameras capture more than just license plates; the photos are used to create what the company calls a searchable “Vehicle Fingerprint.” Using a “proprietary machine learning algorithm,” the company says, it gathers “vehicle make, type, color, license plate, state of the license plate, covered plates, missing plates, and unique features like roof racks and bumper stickers.” Presumably that would allow searches for all vehicles that include a particular political bumper sticker, enabling people to be targeted based on the exercise of their First Amendment-protected free expression rights. If Flock applies its public-private business model and its camera technology to ordinary surveillance cameras, it will be super-charging the spread of centralized police camera networks and helping transform video surveillance from sporadic collections of cameras into truly powerful dragnet surveillance tools. The spread of such systems has been slow because of the expense involved — but Flock could end that. In October 2021, I attended a security conference where security industry analyst and publisher John Honovich of IPVM told attendees that Flock represents a new, disruptive business model in the surveillance video industry. Outdoor cameras have always been orders of magnitude more expensive than indoor cameras, he said, because they are so difficult to install; running power and data lines to outdoor cameras is no easy feat, and they require costly maintenance contracts. Flock is focused on solving what has been a very hard problem of outdoor installations with a new model based on three technologies that are rapid ly improving: solar power, wireless connectivity, and artificial intelligence. The rapid decline in the cost of solar power has made solar cameras more economical, and wireless connectivity continues to improve as well. Most significantly, perhaps, improving AI computer vision allows cameras to constantly monitor a scene and only send data off the camera when the AI has determined that something of significance has appeared. In the case of ALPR, that would be a vehicle driving by — but it could be anything. Sending still photos or short clips of scenes identified as significant by AI algorithms allows for the installation of large numbers of cameras without the strain on bandwidth and storage capacities that full-motion video cameras often bring. According to Honovich, “it’s clear that Flock will get much bigger,” and the company is “a threat to any incumbent doing city-wide systems.” One officer says in a company promotional video that police have even started using the company’s name as a verb — as in, “Have you Flocked that tag yet?” 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 7 Expanding analytics In addition to looking at a move toward full-motion surveillance, Flock’s ambitions include expanding its analytics offerings beyond ALPR. Already, for example, its system can carry out what it calls “convoy analysis,” which involves doing proximity analyses to identify vehicles that are near to each other at crucial times and therefore presumably associated with each other. And in a sales video seen by Vice (apparently since removed from YouTube), the company said it can detect people, cars, animals, and bicycles, a further indication of the company’s interest in expanded video analytics. The company has also announced a troubling expansion of its ALPR devices into audio recording and analytics, unveiling an augmented version of its ALPR cameras called “Raven” that purports to provide audio gunshot and “crime detection” as cloud services. This service will use AI to attempt to identify the sounds of gunshots, screeching tires, breaking glass, and sawing metal (to try to detect catalytic converter theft). The Raven product raises questions about Flock’s direction as AI and machine vision continue to improve. Today the company reads license plates and bumper stickers; tomorrow that could expand to t-shirts and tattoos. And how long before it offers products claiming to be able to visually detect guns, fighting, muggings, “aggression,” or “anomalous” behavior? All of these and many more capabilities are currently being worked on by computer scientists. We discussed this trend in more detail in our 2019 report on video analytics, but the long-term threat is that millions of cameras will be turned into ever-watchful digital officers, never sleeping or distracted but highly biased and error-prone, monitoring us constantly and ready to report us to our neighbors or the authorities. Indeed, one of Flock’s marketing slogans makes this analogy explicit, saying that its cameras “see like a detective.” Flock has another product called “Wing” that allows police to scan through thousands of hours of footage to extract vehicle “fingerprints” for searching — an extremely powerful new surveillance capability. It can thus transform existing third-party cameras owned by police departments into cameras that the company says can — yes — “see like a detective.” The power of cloud AI analytics is that they’re not tied to any particular hardware. Even more so than license plate recognition, other forms of AI are also notoriously brittle and unreliable. It’s highly questionable how effective Flock’s Raven audio analytics service will be, for example. The gunshot detection company ShotSpotter similarly uses microphones distributed across a city to listen for gunshots, but mostly relies on human analysts to try to differentiate between gunshots and other loud bangs — and even so, questions have been raised about ShotSpotter’s false alarm rate and overall effectiveness. The number of false alarms triggered by Raven will likely prove to be significant and perhaps dysfunctional. And of course, Flock will want to access its customers’ cloud data in order to improve its AI, as it says it is already doing with ALPR data. If and when the company moves into collecting live video and other increasingly sensitive data, it will create a significant privacy issue as well. Raven also raises significant legal issues due to wiretapping laws (see below). 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 8 Flock is already building an unprecedented, public-private, distributed-yet-centralized surveillance machine. All the risks posed by such a machine will only grow if the company expands its offerings from ALPR to traditional surveillance cameras and to advanced new forms of behavioral analytics. Privacy practices Flock constantly claims to be “privacy friendly” to try to disarm one of the primary obstacles to its acceptance by communities. It says it doesn’t do face recognition, which is good (though that wouldn’t stop an end-user police department from doing so once it had downloaded an image of a person). For auditing purposes, it includes a data field in which police enter the reason for a search, which is good. It also says it doesn’t sell or share ALPR data with third parties (other than through its database service, which is part of what it is selling with its products), and only retains plate data for 30 days. “With built-in 30-day data retention, everyone’s comfortable,” Langley claims. Everyone is not comfortable. An even shorter retention period would be better, but this system would be far worse than it is if the retention period were longer. Still, given the scale of this system, 30 days is a long enough window that it poses real privacy risks, especially if Flock cameras continue to grow, providing an ever-more-detailed record of people’s movements. People can engage in a lot of perfectly legal yet private behavior within 30 days — movements that would reveal things about their political, financial, sexual, religious, or medical lives that nobody in the police or in a company like Flock has a right to track. As discussed below, a majority on the Supreme Court has explained that tracking a vehicle with GPS constitutes a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes even when the tracking only lasts 28 days. And the court later held that obtaining seven days of location information about a person was a Fourth Amendment “search,” too. Whenever questioned about privacy, Flock executives mention these policies, as if that’s the end of it. But it’s not the end of it; there are many other privacy implications of license plate recognition in general, and Flock’s system in particular, that communities need to consider. Flock may not sell its data but the company itself holds it. And as IPVM aptly put it, if the company achieves its growth targets, “it will effectively become a gigantic private entity that is performing public policing work.” The privacy protections Flock likes to tout are necessary but not sufficient in a system playing that role at such a scale, and Flock’s products raise many privacy issues that aren’t addressed by the privacy practices that they cite. And again, we have no way of knowing whether Flock is following its stated policies, and it could change those policies at any time. A system of mass surveillance Altogether, Flock’s ALPR network adds up to a system of mass surveillance — a system that seems poised to expand beyond just license plate recognition. Mass surveillance systems have long been feared by people who value open, democratic societies, and for good reason. The ability to access a record of all our activities — even if just when we’re in public spaces — 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9 conveys the power to learn an enormous amount about our social, political, sexual, medical, and religious lives. Mass surveillance simply gives too much power to those who control it. Such power lends itself too easily to abuse, chilling people who might want to protest those in power or otherwise exercise their freedom of expression, and generally casting a pall over people’s freedom to live their lives without being watched. Surveillance systems also tend to have a disproportionate impact on Black and Brown and other historically disadvantaged communities. Often police departments install them disproportionately in communities of color. The NYPD used ALPR devices to abusively surveil mosques in the 2000s. And systems such as Flock’s enable the continuation and intensification of patterns of policing such as those uncovered by the Department of Justice in Ferguson, Mo. There, the DOJ found in a comprehensive report that the police department aggressively over- enforced low-level, nonviolent “offenses” in communities of color (a pattern that has been found across the nation, including in New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Boston). In Ferguson and some other jurisdictions, low-level arrests were intentionally used to extract payments to fill municipal coffers. This practice draws poor people who can’t pay fines or who miss court dates into an escalating cycle of fees, fines, police stops , and general entanglement with the criminal justice system, amplifying petty offenses into ruined lives in a truly Dickensian dynamic. Many of those stops and fines involve automobiles, and a dragnet ALPR surveillance system lends itself very naturally to supporting that kind of policing. Legal analysis The system that Flock has built and is building could have many bad effects, but does it violate the law or Constitution? The first question is whether the fact that people and/or their license plates are being photographed in public means that there can’t be any legal violation of privacy. That claim does not appear to be winning acceptance in the courts. In a pair of cases involving police use of digital-age technologies to track or aggregate peoples’ locations and movements, the Supreme Court has explained that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements” because of the “privacies of life” those movements can reveal. In United States v. Jones, a majority of the court wrote that using a GPS tracker to follow a car’s movements for 28 days constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, observing that the ability to “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period” raised serious concerns. More recently, the court held in Carpenter v. United States that when police request seven days or more of a person’s historical cell phone location information from a cellular service provider, a warrant is required. That’s because of the “deeply revealing nature” of these digital location records, their “depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach,” and the “inescapable and automa tic nature of [their] collection.” These rulings expressly rejected the argument that the public nature of the targets’ movements meant they had no legally significant expectation of privacy. Automated license plate readers raise the same concerns the court addressed in Jones and Carpenter: they facilitate detailed, pervasive, cheap, and efficient tracking of millions of 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10 Americans in previously unthinkable ways. ALPR data can reveal private and sensitive details about a person’s life — details that individuals reasonably expect to remain private — and searches of ALPR databases by law enforcement to find evidence of criminal activity should require a warrant. As the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently observed, “With enough cameras in enough locations, the historic location data from an ALPR system ... would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and would constitute a search for constitutional purposes.” And what holds for ALPR cameras should also hold for any future mass-surveillance camera systems that can track people in equivalent ways — for example, by using a centralized network of public and private cameras combined with face recognition or other forms of video analytics or biometrics. The second question is whether Flock’s status as a private company affects this analysis — after all, only the government is constrained by the Fourth Amendment. And in fact, in many contexts, private actors have a right to take photographs that is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment. That right is not absolute, however; lawmakers, if they so choose, do have the authority to regulate photography that interferes with Americans’ reasonable expectations of privacy, such as in private spaces like restrooms or people’s homes. The deployment by private parties of surveillance systems such as camera networks that track people across space and time implicate similarly pressing privacy concerns. But if lawmakers fail to enact such privacy protections, does the Constitution have anything to say about a private company like Flock engaging in such surveillance? It might, if Flock were acting in concert with police departments to the extent that courts would consider it a “state actor.” In past cases, the Supreme Court has found private parties to be state actors (and therefore subject to the Constitution and other laws that apply to the government) where: • Private parties perform public functions that have traditionally and exclusively been performed by the government. • The government influences and encourages the performance of private actions . • The government and a private actor enter into a “joint enterprise” or “symbiotic relationship” or become “pervasively entwined” with each other . This body of law prevents the government from evading its constitutional responsibilities by delegating power to and hiding behind private entities. In the ACLU’s recent successful challenge to the City of Baltimore’s persistent aerial surveillance program, the City did not even dispute that the third party surveillance vendor conducting its surveillance operations was a state actor under the relevant law. Given Flock’s actual entanglement and symbiotic relationship with law enforcement, there would at a minimum be a plausible case that Flock fits this definition and that its ALPR services — and potentially other mass -surveillance services such as a Raven audio recording network or other future offerings — are therefore constrained by constitutional privacy rights. State laws are also relevant in assessing the legality of ALPR deployments. Sixteen states have passed statutes regulating ALPR devices. A few state laws regulate or ban certain private uses of 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 11 ALPR, which would of course directly affect the legality of Flock’s business model in those states. But most of the state laws regulate how law enforcement uses ALPR. California, for example, bans state police departments from sharing ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies, but a number of departments are violating the law. (The ACLU of Northern California is suing over this violation.) State constitutions, many of which have stronger privacy protections than the federal Constitution, may also impose limits on private surveillance business models such as Flock’s. Some state constitutions, such as California’s, also place more limits on private actors. A major question this raises is whether any police departments are using their reliance on this private company to do an end run around these laws. Judges in Virginia, for example, ruled that a Virginia privacy law (which says that personal information “shall not be collected” by state agencies “unless the need for it has been clearly established in advance”) bars police from collecting and storing ALPR data outside of a specific investigation. But if the State Police were accessing Flock’s ALPR database without considering themselves as “collecting” the data held by Flock, that would represent an evasive end-run around the intent of Virginia’s law. Raven Aside from threatening to expand daily surveillance in American life from video to audio monitoring, Flock’s Raven gunshot detection product also raises significant legal questions. While the United States has millions of video cameras in public places, very few of them include microphones, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not because mics are expensive or difficult to install, but because our wiretapping laws make it legally problematic to audio record people in public places. Laws in all the states and federal law make it illegal to record a conversation where the recording party is not a participant — and some state laws require the permission of all participants in a conversation. ShotSpotter’s microphones have survived scrutiny on this score partly because most of its mics are placed high above street level, where they can better hear gunshots and be shielded from everyday sounds. Those mics are also very narrowly targeted toward listening for gunshots, and there is no important privacy interest when it comes to the sound of gunshots in a city. Even so, we and other privacy advocates have been very wary about ShotSpotter’s product on that score. But Flock’s audio sensors, which come packaged with the license plate readers, are placed close to the ground so the ALPR can see vehicles, and are therefore much more likely to pick up conversations. They also extend their monitoring beyond loud percussive noises to other noises that are much more likely to be a regular part of human life. By listening for a broader variety of more ambiguous sounds, Raven is more likely to accidentally record conversations. And in the rich and complicated lives we lead, people might have good reasons to break glass, or saw metal, or make screeching sounds — not to mention other noises that might be mistaken for those sounds by the AI — and shouldn’t have to worry about police arriving on the scene every time they do so. Just recently my neighbor was bringing home groceries and dropped and shattered a glass bottle in her driveway. I found myself thinking about Flock’s product and how glad I was she didn’t 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 12 have to worry about the police showing up — something that, again, poses particular dangers for people of color. Recommendations for Public-Private Surveillance Systems Our nation should not permit the construction of any mass-surveillance systems, including through private-public law enforcement systems such as that being built by Flock. Legislators should enact rules governing ALPR along the lines of the recommendations we laid out in our 2013 report, and extend them to private actors working closely with law enforcement. Policymakers should include the following updates to account for the changing landscape: • Given the increasing regional and national reach of ALPR systems, any non-hit data they collect should be permitted to be held only for very short periods. New Hampshire state law is a good model; it requires that where there is a hit, ALPR data “shall not be recorded or transmitted anywhere and shall be purged from the system within 3 minutes of their capture.” That policy allows the devices to be used to search for wanted vehicles but prevents the creation of dragnet location tracking databases. Retention periods of 30 days are too long for surveillance systems with a breadth and scope of any significance. • No hot lists should be used unless they are certified by independent auditors as meeting the highest standards of due process (allowing people a meaningful way to have themselves or their vehicles removed including through adjudication by a neutral arbiter), legitimacy (being based only on individualized suspicion, and not being based on First Amendment-protected activity, for example), and reliability (including those standards imposed by the Privacy Act of 1974, a standard that the NCIC does not currently meet). • Law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data with third parties that do not conform to the above principles and should be transparent regarding with whom license plate reader data is shared. • Communities and their elected representatives should be especially hesitant to embrace networked surveillance cameras. Before investing in a partnership with Flock they should do some very careful legal analysis in light of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. • Communities that have not yet enacted a CCOPS ordinance should not permit the police that serve them to deploy surveillance devices without first receiving approval from the city council or other elected governing body. The decision-making process around whether to deploy surveillance technology should be transparent and open to public input and debate. Businesses, community associations, and other private parties should consider the following when evaluating or deploying this technology : 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 13 • Private institutions should, at a minimum, think long and hard about whether they truly need ALPR or other dragnet surveillance devices, especially where vendors allow law enforcement — local and not — to search the data collected by any such devices. • Private institutions should not use ALPR or other dragnet surveillance devices unless they disclose that fact to their customers, residents, or others subject to the surveillance. • Housing and community associations that adopt such systems should ask sharp questions about their deployment such as: Who will have access to the data that is collected about you, your family, and friends or other visitors? Will there be any restrictions on the purposes for which data is accessed, or with whom it is shared, or can those with access browse through the data whenever they want? How will requests for access by residents, non-residents, those accused of wrongdoing, media outlets, or others be handled? Is there any logging of access to the data, or other mechanisms for enforcing rules about sharing and access? • Any associations that create their own hotlists should do so only in conformance with the principles above that are applicable to government hot lists. They should also create and publish policies people driving throughout the community can read and understand. Conclusion Flock is pushing the adoption of surveillance devices by private parties and folding them into a larger, centralized network that is fast becoming a key policing infrastructure, all while pushing to expand beyond license plate recognition to other forms of AI machine vision and simultaneously making it much easier to install and c onnect outdoor cameras. If successful, the convergence of these trends — whether under the aegis of Flock or other companies — threatens to bring an entirely new level of surveillance to American communities, where it will further undermine Americans’ privacy, disproportionately harm historically disadvantaged communities, and generally shift power to the government from the governed in our nation. ### 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 1 Fast-Growing Company Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System By Jay Stanley March 3, 2022 A new and rapidly growing surveillance company called Flock Safety is building a form of mass surveillance unlike any seen before in American life. The company has so far focused on selling automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras to homeowner associations and other private parties, as well as to police departments. But it has done so through a business model that effectively enlists its customers into a giant centralized government surveillance network — and the company is aiming to expand its offerings beyond ALPR to traditional video surveillance, while also expanding its AI machine vision capabilities. In this paper, we look at this company’s products, business model, and future aims, and how those embody some of the more worrisome trends in surveillance technology today. Flock is not the only company engaging in mass collection of ALPR data; Motorola Solutions and the company it acquired, Vigilant Solutions, also run a giant nationwide ALPR database, and have recently made a bid to compete with Flock’s strategy. But we focus here on Flock because it is a new, up-and-coming company that industry analysts say is poised for major expansion both geographically and in the kinds of technology it provides. A public/private license-scanning network A startup founded in 2017, Flock has grown rapidly, riding two major trends in the security camera industry: a move to cloud services, and video analytics. The company recently attracted $300 million in venture capital investments, which industry analysts say is “unparalleled in the video surveillance industry” and will put the co mpany “in a position to expand aggressively over the next few years.” The company makes grandiose claims about its mission, which it says is to “eliminate nonviolent crime across the United States.” 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 2 Flock says its fixed cameras have been installed in 1,400 cities across the U.S. and photograph more than a billion vehicles every month, and its ambition is to expand to “every single city in America.” Flock also has a partnership with the body camera company Axon to provide mobile ALPR devices for police vehicles. Flock’s cameras allow private customers like homeowner associations as well as police customers to create a record of the comings and goings of every vehicle that passes in front of the cameras. But the service goes well beyond that; it feeds that data into a centralized database run by Flock. As the company tells police: If you know the specific license plate in question, use FlockOS to get a detailed report of the suspect vehicle’s history over a given timeframe. Use FlockOS’s local and national search network to find the suspect vehicle across state lines, including up to 1 billion monthly plate reads. All this is included, for FREE, for any Flock Safety customer. Flock not only allows private camera owners to create their own “hot lists” that will generate alarms when listed plates are spotted, but also runs all plates against state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). When a camera scores a hit against one of those databases, law enforcement receives an immediate notification. As Flock CEO Garrett Langley explained in 2020: We have a partnership through the FBI that we monitor all of the cameras for about a quarter of a million vehicles that are known wanted — either stolen, it’s a warrant, it’s an amber alert. And so at any given time — about 20 times an hour — we will notify local authorities. … In January we reported just over 67,000 wanted vehicles across the country. This giant surveillance network might also be used by immigration authorities to deport people, as is Motorola’s private ALPR database. Asked by Vice News whether Flock could be used for such purposes, Langley said, “Yes, if it was legal in a state, we would not be in a position to stop them,” adding, “We give our customers the tools to decide and let them go from there.” All of this means that those who purchase Flock cameras are effectively buying and installing surveillance devices not just for themselves, but for the authorities as well, adding their cameras to a nationwide network searchable by the police. The closest thing to this model we have seen before is the doorbell camera company Ring, which also raises many troubling issues. But Flock is working (and enlisting its customers to work) directly as an agent of law enforcement even more than Ring. It says it is “working with” over 700 law enforcement agencies and , according to Langley, At the end of the day, we view the police department as our actual end-user. They’re the only ones that can make an arrest. So neighborhoods, apartment complexes, motels, hotels, malls, hospitals — they might pay for the camera, but more often than not the only ones that are actually looking at it are the police . … Most of our software is actually running in the patrol vehicles. So if there’s a crime, or there’s a stolen car that drives by, 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 3 we’re notifying the nearest officer, typically within a few seconds from when that happens, and they can turn on the blue lights and go get ‘em. As with Ring, police departments appear to be coordinating with Flock in ways that are unseemly for agencies serving the public. Vice reported that it obtained emails showing that “Flock works closely with police to try and generate positive media coverage, improve the ir PR strategy, and … ‘bring more private cameras into the area.’” Flock has also helped write police press releases, Vice found, and officers appear in Flock promotional videos. Emails obtained by the video surveillance industry research group IPVM show local Texas police referring homeowners associations and other neighborhood groups to Flock, advocating for the company at community meetings, providing the company with neighborhood contact lists, and introducing other police chiefs to company sales managers. In 2020, Langley told a police audience, When you partn er with Flock … you’re also getting a new ability to do public outreach. … Every single day we’re working with our chiefs and their command staff to host community events, to build awareness, and more importantly, build a common trust and relationship between your constituents and the police department. And the end result is more cameras at no cost to you. The company has run into trouble for pushing police departments to embrace its technology without getting the approval of the communities those departments serve. It has also created conflict in some communities where its cameras have been proposed or adopted, and sparked well-founded concerns that the technology might have a disproportionate effect on communities of color and other vulnerable communities. Centralization of data When a neighborhood association buys a Flock camera, it is basically contributing a piece of equipment to a new nationwide law enforcement surveillance infrastructure that, as Slate put it, means even “small-town police departments can suddenly afford to conduct surveillance at a massive scale.” Flock can gather the information captured by its cameras around the country into its own centralized database because it is a cloud-based service provider rather than a mere seller of hardware. That database is available to more than 500 U.S. police departments. As a business matter, this allows the company to benefit from self-reinforcing network effects. But if Flock cameras become as widespread and densely placed as the company hopes, law enforcement will gain the ability to know the detailed movements of virtually any vehicle for as far into the past as that data is held. That would create enormous risks of privacy violations and other abuses and would have significant legal implications as well. And the risk of abuse by government is all too real. Unfortunately, this country has a long tradition, extending up to the present, of law enforcement targeting people not because they’re suspected of criminal activity but because of their political or religious beliefs or race. That includes quasi-private surveillance. There are also many documented instances of individual officers abusing police databases, including ALPR databases. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 4 We have long had concerns about the dangers posed by hybrid public-private surveillance practices — but Flock threatens to take that to a new level. In the past we have noted that distributed private surveillance cameras are less of a threat to civil liberties than centralized surveillance networks — but also warned that if all those private cameras were connected to a cloud, the effect would be to re-centralize them. By pulling all the data recorded by its customers — including its police customers — into its own centralized servers, Flock not only creates an enormously powerful private-public machine sweeping up data on Americans’ activities, but puts itself at that machine’s center. It’s bad enough when law enforcement engages in such mass surveillance, but to have such data flowing through a private company creates an additional set of incentives for abuse. For one thing, there are no checks and balances on the use of this database. The lack of proper checks on the behavior of law enforcement is well established — and studies suggest improper use of ALPR in particular may be widespread. Nor are there adequate checks on Flock. The company says it only keeps ALPR data for 30 days, but no laws require them to honor that promise. The company controls an enormous data set that could probably be monetized in various ways — and while the company is growing fast now, boom times never last forever. What will future managers do if the company hits tough times, the spotlight has moved on from their controversial role, and they’re tempted to reach for revenue they’re flushing out of their database every 30 days? How might they use their tool against competitors, or against workers, say, if they find themselves fighting a union battle? We’ve already had a glimpse of what can go wrong with cloud surveillance providers in the case of the company Verkada, which was hacked and found to be secretly tapping into its customers’ cameras. Indeed, think what present or future leaders or employees at Flock could do with that power — or what they could be pressured or forced into doing by unscrupulous government officials. We know that Ring gave workers access to every Ring camera in the world, together with customer details. Other companies offering cloud services have also run into controversy from granting such access, including Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Facebook. Those companies accessed people’s data to improve their AI models, which are always hungry for real-world data. Flock likewise says that its cloud architecture “allows us to continue to improve the software and deploy enhancements out to our cameras in real-time.” Of course, the authorities and the company are not the only possible sources of abuse; there are plenty of reasons to worry about nosy homeowner association board members and the like using this tool to snoop on the comings and goings of their neighbors (and their neighbors’ friends, family, lovers, etc.). Neighborhood administrators are not subject to ev en such training and oversight as is applied to the police, and don’t generally know how to impose access restrictions, if they even think of doing so. It is true that all vehicles are required to display license plates, and in our past work on ALPRs we have written that license plate readers would pose few civil liberties risks if they only checked plates against legitimate hot lists and these hot lists were implemented soundly. But we also noted that a proliferation of cameras and widespread sharing allow for the creation of intrusive records of our comings and goings, create chilling effects , and open the door to abusive 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 5 tracking. And the scale of what Flock is doing goes far beyond what was contemplated when ALPRs first arrived on the scene. Accuracy problems ALPR is also bedeviled by accuracy problems. In tests, IPVM found that Flock’s ALPR worked well overall compared to other products — but nothing is perfect, and even a low error rate can produce tragic consequences given the scale of Flock’s operations . In particular, IPVM found that Flock’s system misidentified a license plate’s state about 10 percent of the time. Given that state misidentification errors have led to innocent people being terrorized by the police as presumed dangerous criminals, that is a real problem. The FBI’s NCIC database that Flock checks plates against is notoriously inaccurate, and people have been badly harmed by inaccuracies in that database, including through ALPR cameras. Federal law requires that government agencies maintain records used to make “any determination about any individual” with “such accuracy, relevance, timeliness, and completeness as is reasonably necessary to assure fairness to the individual in the determination.” That doesn’t seem like too much to ask — but when it comes to its NCIC database, the FBI felt compelled to exempt itself from that law. One detective also told colleagues on LinkedIn that “today we almost did a felony stop on a stolen vehicle that wasn’t actually stolen,” and reminded them that when dealing with stolen cars they must “remember to remove the vehicle if it’s recovered.” A system dependent on busy and sometimes sloppy officers to remember to carry out such follow through is also a recipe for trouble. Another source of potential error is that Flock’s cameras download fresh hit lists from the NCIC only twice a day, which creates the possibility that the removal of a plate from the hotlist will cause out-of-date alerts to be sent to law enforcement for up to 12 hours until the next update. The accuracy problems with ALPRs have led to many incidents in which people have been subject to traumatic treatment by law enforcement because of errors. And when law enforcement comes running on high alert because technology has raised an alarm, those most likely to be subject to such treatment — or worse — are Black people and members of other vulnerable communities for whom even the most casual encounter with law enforcement can turn deadly. When the only people running plates were police officers doing so manually and only when they personally witnessed a suspicious vehicle, errors in law enforcement databases like the NCIC occasionally had bad effects. But when plates are being run 500 million times a month, the consequences of errors in those databases become greatly magnified. (For more on the problems ALPR devices present see the ACLU’s 2013 report and this 2017 Electronic Frontier Foundation page on the technology.) 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 6 Beyond license plates Flock does not plan to remain limited to ALPR cameras. Langley, its CEO, told IPVM that the company is working on ideas for traditional camera products and sees “a ton of opportunity in the traditional [surveillance] market.” Already, the photos taken by Flock’s ALPR cameras capture more than just license plates; the photos are used to create what the company calls a searchable “Vehicle Fingerprint.” Using a “proprietary machine learning algorithm,” the company says, it gathers “vehicle make, type, color, license plate, state of the license plate, covered plates, missing plates, and unique features like roof racks and bumper stickers.” Presumably that would allow searches for all vehicles that include a particular political bumper sticker, enabling people to be targeted based on the exercise of their First Amendment-protected free expression rights. If Flock applies its public-private business model and its camera technology to ordinary surveillance cameras, it will be super-charging the spread of centralized police camera networks and helping transform video surveillance from sporadic collections of cameras into truly powerful dragnet surveillance tools. The spread of such systems has been slow because of the expense involved — but Flock could end that. In October 2021, I attended a security conference where security industry analyst and publisher John Honovich of IPVM told attendees that Flock represents a new, disruptive business model in the surveillance video industry. Outdoor cameras have always been orders of magnitude more expensive than indoor cameras, he said, because they are so difficult to install; running power and data lines to outdoor cameras is no easy feat, and they require costly maintenance contracts. Flock is focused on solving what has been a very hard problem of outdoor installations with a new model based on three technologies that are rapid ly improving: solar power, wireless connectivity, and artificial intelligence. The rapid decline in the cost of solar power has made solar cameras more economical, and wireless connectivity continues to improve as well. Most significantly, perhaps, improving AI computer vision allows cameras to constantly monitor a scene and only send data off the camera when the AI has determined that something of significance has appeared. In the case of ALPR, that would be a vehicle driving by — but it could be anything. Sending still photos or short clips of scenes identified as significant by AI algorithms allows for the installation of large numbers of cameras without the strain on bandwidth and storage capacities that full-motion video cameras often bring. According to Honovich, “it’s clear that Flock will get much bigger,” and the company is “a threat to any incumbent doing city-wide systems.” One officer says in a company promotional video that police have even started using the company’s name as a verb — as in, “Have you Flocked that tag yet?” 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 7 Expanding analytics In addition to looking at a move toward full-motion surveillance, Flock’s ambitions include expanding its analytics offerings beyond ALPR. Already, for example, its system can carry out what it calls “convoy analysis,” which involves doing proximity analyses to identify vehicles that are near to each other at crucial times and therefore presumably associated with each other. And in a sales video seen by Vice (apparently since removed from YouTube), the company said it can detect people, cars, animals, and bicycles, a further indication of the company’s interest in expanded video analytics. The company has also announced a troubling expansion of its ALPR devices into audio recording and analytics, unveiling an augmented version of its ALPR cameras called “Raven” that purports to provide audio gunshot and “crime detection” as cloud services. This service will use AI to attempt to identify the sounds of gunshots, screeching tires, breaking glass, and sawing metal (to try to detect catalytic converter theft). The Raven product raises questions about Flock’s direction as AI and machine vision continue to improve. Today the company reads license plates and bumper stickers; tomorrow that could expand to t-shirts and tattoos. And how long before it offers products claiming to be able to visually detect guns, fighting, muggings, “aggression,” or “anomalous” behavior? All of these and many more capabilities are currently being worked on by computer scientists. We discussed this trend in more detail in our 2019 report on video analytics, but the long-term threat is that millions of cameras will be turned into ever-watchful digital officers, never sleeping or distracted but highly biased and error-prone, monitoring us constantly and ready to report us to our neighbors or the authorities. Indeed, one of Flock’s marketing slogans makes this analogy explicit, saying that its cameras “see like a detective.” Flock has another product called “Wing” that allows police to scan through thousands of hours of footage to extract vehicle “fingerprints” for searching — an extremely powerful new surveillance capability. It can thus transform existing third-party cameras owned by police departments into cameras that the company says can — yes — “see like a detective.” The power of cloud AI analytics is that they’re not tied to any particular hardware. Even more so than license plate recognition, other forms of AI are also notoriously brittle and unreliable. It’s highly questionable how effective Flock’s Raven audio analytics service will be, for example. The gunshot detection company ShotSpotter similarly uses microphones distributed across a city to listen for gunshots, but mostly relies on human analysts to try to differentiate between gunshots and other loud bangs — and even so, questions have been raised about ShotSpotter’s false alarm rate and overall effectiveness. The number of false alarms triggered by Raven will likely prove to be significant and perhaps dysfunctional. And of course, Flock will want to access its customers’ cloud data in order to improve its AI, as it says it is already doing with ALPR data. If and when the company moves into collecting live video and other increasingly sensitive data, it will create a significant privacy issue as well. Raven also raises significant legal issues due to wiretapping laws (see below). 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 8 Flock is already building an unprecedented, public-private, distributed-yet-centralized surveillance machine. All the risks posed by such a machine will only grow if the company expands its offerings from ALPR to traditional surveillance cameras and to advanced new forms of behavioral analytics. Privacy practices Flock constantly claims to be “privacy friendly” to try to disarm one of the primary obstacles to its acceptance by communities. It says it doesn’t do face recognition, which is good (though that wouldn’t stop an end-user police department from doing so once it had downloaded an image of a person). For auditing purposes, it includes a data field in which police enter the reason for a search, which is good. It also says it doesn’t sell or share ALPR data with third parties (other than through its database service, which is part of what it is selling with its products), and only retains plate data for 30 days. “With built-in 30-day data retention, everyone’s comfortable,” Langley claims. Everyone is not comfortable. An even shorter retention period would be better, but this system would be far worse than it is if the retention period were longer. Still, given the scale of this system, 30 days is a long enough window that it poses real privacy risks, especially if Flock cameras continue to grow, providing an ever-more-detailed record of people’s movements. People can engage in a lot of perfectly legal yet private behavior within 30 days — movements that would reveal things about their political, financial, sexual, religious, or medical lives that nobody in the police or in a company like Flock has a right to track. As discussed below, a majority on the Supreme Court has explained that tracking a vehicle with GPS constitutes a “search” for Fourth Amendment purposes even when the tracking only lasts 28 days. And the court later held that obtaining seven days of location information about a person was a Fourth Amendment “search,” too. Whenever questioned about privacy, Flock executives mention these policies, as if that’s the end of it. But it’s not the end of it; there are many other privacy implications of license plate recognition in general, and Flock’s system in particular, that communities need to consider. Flock may not sell its data but the company itself holds it. And as IPVM aptly put it, if the company achieves its growth targets, “it will effectively become a gigantic private entity that is performing public policing work.” The privacy protections Flock likes to tout are necessary but not sufficient in a system playing that role at such a scale, and Flock’s products raise many privacy issues that aren’t addressed by the privacy practices that they cite. And again, we have no way of knowing whether Flock is following its stated policies, and it could change those policies at any time. A system of mass surveillance Altogether, Flock’s ALPR network adds up to a system of mass surveillance — a system that seems poised to expand beyond just license plate recognition. Mass surveillance systems have long been feared by people who value open, democratic societies, and for good reason. The ability to access a record of all our activities — even if just when we’re in public spaces — 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9 conveys the power to learn an enormous amount about our social, political, sexual, medical, and religious lives. Mass surveillance simply gives too much power to those who control it. Such power lends itself too easily to abuse, chilling people who might want to protest those in power or otherwise exercise their freedom of expression, and generally casting a pall over people’s freedom to live their lives without being watched. Surveillance systems also tend to have a disproportionate impact on Black and Brown and other historically disadvantaged communities. Often police departments install them disproportionately in communities of color. The NYPD used ALPR devices to abusively surveil mosques in the 2000s. And systems such as Flock’s enable the continuation and intensification of patterns of policing such as those uncovered by the Department of Justice in Ferguson, Mo. There, the DOJ found in a comprehensive report that the police department aggressively over- enforced low-level, nonviolent “offenses” in communities of color (a pattern that has been found across the nation, including in New York City, Minneapolis, Chicago, North Carolina, Philadelphia, and Boston). In Ferguson and some other jurisdictions, low-level arrests were intentionally used to extract payments to fill municipal coffers. This practice draws poor people who can’t pay fines or who miss court dates into an escalating cycle of fees, fines, police stops , and general entanglement with the criminal justice system, amplifying petty offenses into ruined lives in a truly Dickensian dynamic. Many of those stops and fines involve automobiles, and a dragnet ALPR surveillance system lends itself very naturally to supporting that kind of policing. Legal analysis The system that Flock has built and is building could have many bad effects, but does it violate the law or Constitution? The first question is whether the fact that people and/or their license plates are being photographed in public means that there can’t be any legal violation of privacy. That claim does not appear to be winning acceptance in the courts. In a pair of cases involving police use of digital-age technologies to track or aggregate peoples’ locations and movements, the Supreme Court has explained that “individuals have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the whole of their physical movements” because of the “privacies of life” those movements can reveal. In United States v. Jones, a majority of the court wrote that using a GPS tracker to follow a car’s movements for 28 days constitutes a Fourth Amendment search, observing that the ability to “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period” raised serious concerns. More recently, the court held in Carpenter v. United States that when police request seven days or more of a person’s historical cell phone location information from a cellular service provider, a warrant is required. That’s because of the “deeply revealing nature” of these digital location records, their “depth, breadth, and comprehensive reach,” and the “inescapable and automa tic nature of [their] collection.” These rulings expressly rejected the argument that the public nature of the targets’ movements meant they had no legally significant expectation of privacy. Automated license plate readers raise the same concerns the court addressed in Jones and Carpenter: they facilitate detailed, pervasive, cheap, and efficient tracking of millions of 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10 Americans in previously unthinkable ways. ALPR data can reveal private and sensitive details about a person’s life — details that individuals reasonably expect to remain private — and searches of ALPR databases by law enforcement to find evidence of criminal activity should require a warrant. As the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court recently observed, “With enough cameras in enough locations, the historic location data from an ALPR system ... would invade a reasonable expectation of privacy and would constitute a search for constitutional purposes.” And what holds for ALPR cameras should also hold for any future mass-surveillance camera systems that can track people in equivalent ways — for example, by using a centralized network of public and private cameras combined with face recognition or other forms of video analytics or biometrics. The second question is whether Flock’s status as a private company affects this analysis — after all, only the government is constrained by the Fourth Amendment. And in fact, in many contexts, private actors have a right to take photographs that is protected by the Constitution’s First Amendment. That right is not absolute, however; lawmakers, if they so choose, do have the authority to regulate photography that interferes with Americans’ reasonable expectations of privacy, such as in private spaces like restrooms or people’s homes. The deployment by private parties of surveillance systems such as camera networks that track people across space and time implicate similarly pressing privacy concerns. But if lawmakers fail to enact such privacy protections, does the Constitution have anything to say about a private company like Flock engaging in such surveillance? It might, if Flock were acting in concert with police departments to the extent that courts would consider it a “state actor.” In past cases, the Supreme Court has found private parties to be state actors (and therefore subject to the Constitution and other laws that apply to the government) where: • Private parties perform public functions that have traditionally and exclusively been performed by the government. • The government influences and encourages the performance of private actions . • The government and a private actor enter into a “joint enterprise” or “symbiotic relationship” or become “pervasively entwined” with each other . This body of law prevents the government from evading its constitutional responsibilities by delegating power to and hiding behind private entities. In the ACLU’s recent successful challenge to the City of Baltimore’s persistent aerial surveillance program, the City did not even dispute that the third party surveillance vendor conducting its surveillance operations was a state actor under the relevant law. Given Flock’s actual entanglement and symbiotic relationship with law enforcement, there would at a minimum be a plausible case that Flock fits this definition and that its ALPR services — and potentially other mass -surveillance services such as a Raven audio recording network or other future offerings — are therefore constrained by constitutional privacy rights. State laws are also relevant in assessing the legality of ALPR deployments. Sixteen states have passed statutes regulating ALPR devices. A few state laws regulate or ban certain private uses of 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 11 ALPR, which would of course directly affect the legality of Flock’s business model in those states. But most of the state laws regulate how law enforcement uses ALPR. California, for example, bans state police departments from sharing ALPR data with out-of-state and federal agencies, but a number of departments are violating the law. (The ACLU of Northern California is suing over this violation.) State constitutions, many of which have stronger privacy protections than the federal Constitution, may also impose limits on private surveillance business models such as Flock’s. Some state constitutions, such as California’s, also place more limits on private actors. A major question this raises is whether any police departments are using their reliance on this private company to do an end run around these laws. Judges in Virginia, for example, ruled that a Virginia privacy law (which says that personal information “shall not be collected” by state agencies “unless the need for it has been clearly established in advance”) bars police from collecting and storing ALPR data outside of a specific investigation. But if the State Police were accessing Flock’s ALPR database without considering themselves as “collecting” the data held by Flock, that would represent an evasive end-run around the intent of Virginia’s law. Raven Aside from threatening to expand daily surveillance in American life from video to audio monitoring, Flock’s Raven gunshot detection product also raises significant legal questions. While the United States has millions of video cameras in public places, very few of them include microphones, and there’s a good reason for that. It’s not because mics are expensive or difficult to install, but because our wiretapping laws make it legally problematic to audio record people in public places. Laws in all the states and federal law make it illegal to record a conversation where the recording party is not a participant — and some state laws require the permission of all participants in a conversation. ShotSpotter’s microphones have survived scrutiny on this score partly because most of its mics are placed high above street level, where they can better hear gunshots and be shielded from everyday sounds. Those mics are also very narrowly targeted toward listening for gunshots, and there is no important privacy interest when it comes to the sound of gunshots in a city. Even so, we and other privacy advocates have been very wary about ShotSpotter’s product on that score. But Flock’s audio sensors, which come packaged with the license plate readers, are placed close to the ground so the ALPR can see vehicles, and are therefore much more likely to pick up conversations. They also extend their monitoring beyond loud percussive noises to other noises that are much more likely to be a regular part of human life. By listening for a broader variety of more ambiguous sounds, Raven is more likely to accidentally record conversations. And in the rich and complicated lives we lead, people might have good reasons to break glass, or saw metal, or make screeching sounds — not to mention other noises that might be mistaken for those sounds by the AI — and shouldn’t have to worry about police arriving on the scene every time they do so. Just recently my neighbor was bringing home groceries and dropped and shattered a glass bottle in her driveway. I found myself thinking about Flock’s product and how glad I was she didn’t 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 12 have to worry about the police showing up — something that, again, poses particular dangers for people of color. Recommendations for Public-Private Surveillance Systems Our nation should not permit the construction of any mass-surveillance systems, including through private-public law enforcement systems such as that being built by Flock. Legislators should enact rules governing ALPR along the lines of the recommendations we laid out in our 2013 report, and extend them to private actors working closely with law enforcement. Policymakers should include the following updates to account for the changing landscape: • Given the increasing regional and national reach of ALPR systems, any non-hit data they collect should be permitted to be held only for very short periods. New Hampshire state law is a good model; it requires that where there is a hit, ALPR data “shall not be recorded or transmitted anywhere and shall be purged from the system within 3 minutes of their capture.” That policy allows the devices to be used to search for wanted vehicles but prevents the creation of dragnet location tracking databases. Retention periods of 30 days are too long for surveillance systems with a breadth and scope of any significance. • No hot lists should be used unless they are certified by independent auditors as meeting the highest standards of due process (allowing people a meaningful way to have themselves or their vehicles removed including through adjudication by a neutral arbiter), legitimacy (being based only on individualized suspicion, and not being based on First Amendment-protected activity, for example), and reliability (including those standards imposed by the Privacy Act of 1974, a standard that the NCIC does not currently meet). • Law enforcement agencies should not share license plate reader data with third parties that do not conform to the above principles and should be transparent regarding with whom license plate reader data is shared. • Communities and their elected representatives should be especially hesitant to embrace networked surveillance cameras. Before investing in a partnership with Flock they should do some very careful legal analysis in light of the Supreme Court’s Carpenter decision. • Communities that have not yet enacted a CCOPS ordinance should not permit the police that serve them to deploy surveillance devices without first receiving approval from the city council or other elected governing body. The decision-making process around whether to deploy surveillance technology should be transparent and open to public input and debate. Businesses, community associations, and other private parties should consider the following when evaluating or deploying this technology : 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 13 • Private institutions should, at a minimum, think long and hard about whether they truly need ALPR or other dragnet surveillance devices, especially where vendors allow law enforcement — local and not — to search the data collected by any such devices. • Private institutions should not use ALPR or other dragnet surveillance devices unless they disclose that fact to their customers, residents, or others subject to the surveillance. • Housing and community associations that adopt such systems should ask sharp questions about their deployment such as: Who will have access to the data that is collected about you, your family, and friends or other visitors? Will there be any restrictions on the purposes for which data is accessed, or with whom it is shared, or can those with access browse through the data whenever they want? How will requests for access by residents, non-residents, those accused of wrongdoing, media outlets, or others be handled? Is there any logging of access to the data, or other mechanisms for enforcing rules about sharing and access? • Any associations that create their own hotlists should do so only in conformance with the principles above that are applicable to government hot lists. They should also create and publish policies people driving throughout the community can read and understand. Conclusion Flock is pushing the adoption of surveillance devices by private parties and folding them into a larger, centralized network that is fast becoming a key policing infrastructure, all while pushing to expand beyond license plate recognition to other forms of AI machine vision and simultaneously making it much easier to install and c onnect outdoor cameras. If successful, the convergence of these trends — whether under the aegis of Flock or other companies — threatens to bring an entirely new level of surveillance to American communities, where it will further undermine Americans’ privacy, disproportionately harm historically disadvantaged communities, and generally shift power to the government from the governed in our nation. ### 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:34 PM How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers | ACLU https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-rea…1/5 HOME NEWS & COMMENTARY How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers Even if you can’t stop Flock’s use entirely, you can still help protect civil liberties in your community. PRIVACY & TECHNOLOGY Chad Marlow, Senior Policy Counsel, ACLU Jay Stanley, Senior Policy Analyst, ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project February 13, 2023 From Pasadena, California to Lexington, Kentucky to Menasha, Wisconsin, to Newark, New Jersey, the surveillance company Flock Safety is blanketing American cities with dangerously powerful and unregulated automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras. While license plate readers have been around for some time, Flock is the first to create a nationwide mass-surveillance system out of its customers’ cameras. Working with police departments, neighborhood watches, and other private customers, Flock not only allows private camera owners to create their own “hot lists” that will generate alarms when listed plates are spotted, but also runs all plates against state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Flock’s goal is to expand to “every city in the United States,” and its cameras are already in use in over 2,000 cities in at least 42 states. Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns. And every new customer that buys and installs the company’s cameras extends Flock’s network, contributing to the creation of a centralized mass surveillance system of Orwellian scope. Motorola Solutions, a competitor to Flock, is pursuing a similar business model. If the police or government leaders are pushing for Flock or another centralized mass- surveillance ALPR system in your community, we urge you to oppose it, full stop. You can do this by urging your local councilperson or other elected representatives to adopt 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:34 PM How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers | ACLU https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-rea…2/5 our recommendations into law, attending public meetings and hearings, and raising the profile of the issue by writing letters to the editor and op-eds. You can also use social media to highlight the issues — be sure to tag your elected officials — including by sharing this blog post. If you’re an elected official or community leader, you may also be able to engage directly with your police department — we have found that some departments are willing to do so. In a few places, residents concerned about privacy and over-policing have successfully blocked their police departments’ acquisition of Flock or other ALPR systems. But, in many other cities, those efforts have been thwarted. In communities where such systems can’t be stopped entirely, we can still help protect our and our neighbors’ civil liberties by working with our local police department and elected officials to ensure that local ALPR cameras do not feed into a mass surveillance system that lets potentially every law enforcement department in the world spy on the residents and visitors of any city in America. We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date. But there’s no reason the technology should be used to create comprehensive records of everybody’s comings and goings — and that is precisely what ALPR databases like Flock’s are doing. In our country, the government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing. We more fully lay out our concerns with this technology in a March 2022 white paper on Flock, and in a 2013 report on law enforcement use. Fast-Growing Company Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:34 PM How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers | ACLU https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-rea…3/5 Flock's adoption of new technology may expand current government surveillance reach and erode Americans’ privacy. Source: American Civil Liberties Union Many police departments neither understand nor endorse Flock’s nationwide, mass surveillance-driven approach to ALPR use, but are adopting the company’s cameras simply because other police departments in their region are doing so. As such, they may be amenable to compromise. That might even include using another vendor that does not tie its cameras into a mass-surveillance system. In other cases, you may be able to get your police department or local legislators to add addendums to Flock’s standard contract that limit its ALPR system’s mass surveillance capabilities and highly permissive data sharing. In those situations, the three most important areas for regulation and negotiation are how long the data is retained, who the data is shared with, and how that data is used by law enforcement. We obtained samples of Flock’s Government Agency Customer Agreements with the Greensboro, North Carolina Police Department and other Flock contracts with local police. Below is suggested contract language across these three areas, based on these agreements, that you can use in your local advocacy efforts. Data Retention Whether ALPRs are being used for Amber Alerts, toll collection, or to identify stolen vehicles, a license plate can be run against a watchlist in seconds. The police do not need records of every person’s coming and goings, including trips to doctor’s offices, religious institutions, and political gatherings. New Hampshire state law, which requires law enforcement to delete non-hit license plate capture data within three minutes, is a good model. But you should get the shortest retention period you can in your community. From worst to best, here are three approaches that can be taken to the retention of ALPR data: Data Sharing /Use by Others One of the most important privacy-protective steps you can take is to restrict your community’s ALPR system to local use, meaning local ALPR scans are only checked against locally developed watch lists. Allowing local ALPR data to be used by outside law enforcement creates significant risks. Your local ALPR data could be used to enforce anti-abortion or anti-immigrant laws from other jurisdictions, or even to assist foreign, authoritarian regimes in hunting down political opponents and refugees living in 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:34 PM How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers | ACLU https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-rea…4/5 America (Flock’s default provisions give the company a “worldwide” license to use its customers’ APLR data). These risks are simply not worth taking, especially since there are many other companies that sell locally focused systems. From worst to best, here are three data sharing and use approaches: Database Use As much as we might hope that all police watchlists were 100 percent reliable, we know they are not. In fact, the largest and most commonly used national watch list — the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database — does not even comply with the 1974 United States Privacy Act’s basic accuracy, reliability, and completeness requirements. That means allowing your ALPR data to be run against such databases will subject anyone living in or visiting your town to unjustified arrest and detention, which is an especially dangerous proposition for members of vulnerable, already overpoliced communities. Again, from worst to best, here are three database use approaches: In the end, neither local police departments, nor government officials, nor residents should blindly accept Flock’s model simply because it advances Flock’s bottom line, or because other jurisdictions have unwisely chosen to do so. We continue to believe that using Flock cameras should be opposed outright. But where that battle can’t be won, then any system should at least be confined to the community itself and not made part of a national and international mass-surveillance system. Privacy & Technology Video Surveillance Privacy and Surveillance Surveillance Technologies Learn More About the Issues on This Page 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 9/26/23, 3:34 PM How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers | ACLU https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-rea…5/5 National Security Related Content ACLU Urges Congress to Strike Down Dangerous Legislation Threatening to Destroy Digital Privacy and Free Speech Online How Our Affiliates are Fighting for Education Equity Long Lake Township v. Maxon ACLU Celebrates Senate Doing Its Job and Appointing a Fifth FCC Commissioner Press Release News & Commentary Court Case Press Release 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:City of Palm Springs To:City Clerk; City Clerk Subject:*NEW SUBMISSION* Submit Public Comment to the City of Palm Springs Date:Tuesday, September 26, 2023 7:22:36 PM Submit Public Comment to the City of Palm Springs Submission #:2726252 IP Address:172.56.177.55 Submission Date:09/26/2023 7:22 Survey Time:4 minutes, 15 seconds You have a new online form submission. Note: all answers displaying "*****" are marked as sensitive and must be viewed after your login. Full Name/Nombre Chani Rubin City of Residence/Ciudad de residencia Palm Springs, Phone (optional) /Teléfono (opcional) Email (optional/opcional) Your Comments/Sus comentarios In his comments tonight regarding license plate cameras, councilman Ron DeHarte claimed he’d received no feedback from the community regarding the issue. This is false. I personally know of people who submitted comments here and now I’d like to submit my own. These cameras are the first step towards detracting from what make this city wonderful. Getting an image of a license plate doesn’t catch the criminal- just a car they may have driven. So either it’s more nefarious than we are being told and does facial recognition or you’re being lied to. Is the police department getting a kickback for signing with Flock specifically? Solve regular crime first, we don’t need these weapons in our city. Thank you, City of Palm Springs This is an automated message generated by Granicus. Please do not reply directly to this email. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Jeffrey Bernstein To:City Clerk Subject:Fwd: License plate readers - support Date:Wednesday, September 27, 2023 7:27:42 AM Thank you, Jeffrey Jeffrey Bernstein Mayor Pro Tem, Councilmember City of Palm Springs 442-305-9942 Jeffrey.Bernstein@palmspringsca.gov Begin forwarded message: From: comcast <petensean@comcast.net> Date: September 27, 2023 at 7:12:40 AM PDT To: Ron deHarte <Ron.deHarte@palmspringsca.gov>, Christy Holstege <Christy.Holstege@palmspringsca.gov>, Lisa Middleton <Lisa.Middleton@palmspringsca.gov>, Grace Garner <Grace.Garner@palmspringsca.gov>, Jeffrey Bernstein <Jeffrey.Bernstein@palmspringsca.gov> Cc: Chief - Management Team <chief@palmspringsca.gov> Subject: License plate readers - support NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. I strongly support these cameras. As someone who does NOT commit crimes, I’m not concerned with invasion of privacy. I would prefer to have the police department awarded the tools needed to combat crime. Palm Springs is growing. Please listen to our passionate and compassionate police chief. We need to support any crime-fighting and homelessness measures that he supports. Sincerely, Peter Grame iPhone reply... 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Kevin Skinner To:City Clerk Subject:LPR Cameras Date:Sunday, October 1, 2023 6:00:31 AM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. Dear Honorable Counsel Members, I am in 100% support of purchasing and installing the license plate reader cameras that Police Chief Andy Mills has requested. There is absolutely no downside to their installation. They will make our vulnerable community safer. Please vote yes for our safety. Sincerely, Kevin Skinner 183 Figuaro Dr Palm Springs, CA 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Grace Garner To:City Clerk Subject:FW: License plate readers Date:Monday, October 2, 2023 1:27:11 PM From: charlotte hedlund <chedlund64@gmail.com> Date: Saturday, September 30, 2023 at 10:56 PM To: Grace Garner <Grace.Garner@palmspringsca.gov> Subject: License plate readers NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. Hello Grace, I understand there is hesitancy in acquiring license plate readers by our city council for our police. Our city police have done everything the correct way for the community since Chief Mills came on board. I realize this might cause a threat to some residents, feelings of big brother spying on them. Some residents insecurities should not deter tools needed to combat the brazen criminals in our community that insist on blatantly committing crimes due to lack of consequences imposed by the judicial system. I support the license plate readers in our community as a tool to solving crime in an expedited manner. Thanks for your time once again, Charlotte Schewaga Palm Springs resident. Sent from my iPhone 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Grace Garner To:City Clerk Subject:FW: License plate Cameras Date:Monday, October 2, 2023 1:53:32 PM From: Claudia Goodridge <claudia.goodridge@gmail.com> Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 9:41 AM To: Grace Garner <Grace.Garner@palmspringsca.gov>, Jeffrey Bernstein <Jeffrey.Bernstein@palmspringsca.gov> Subject: License plate Cameras NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. What a slippery slope. License plate, car id, etc recorded upon entering the city and elsewhere within. Opposed. I am totally opposed as is my husband. It sounds harmless enough, but we all know it can be expanded beyond the original intent. For starters I am concerned that women seeking reproductive health attention will be noticed, recorded, and potentially hurt by states other than CA. Yes, I know there are supposedly rules in place to prevent that, but we all know the rules can change quickly. We all thought Roe v Wade was set in stone! A right! Well…you know how that went. Please do not assist. I already contacted Lisa Middleton about this. Regards, Claudia Goodridge 1131 S Driftwood Dr. Sent from my iPad 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Grace Garner To:City Clerk Subject:FW: License plate readers - support Date:Monday, October 2, 2023 1:53:51 PM From: comcast <petensean@comcast.net> Date: Wednesday, September 27, 2023 at 7:12 AM To: Ron deHarte <Ron.deHarte@palmspringsca.gov>, Christy Holstege <Christy.Holstege@palmspringsca.gov>, Lisa Middleton <Lisa.Middleton@palmspringsca.gov>, Grace Garner <Grace.Garner@palmspringsca.gov>, Jeffrey Bernstein <Jeffrey.Bernstein@palmspringsca.gov> Cc: Chief - Management Team <chief@palmspringsca.gov> Subject: License plate readers - support NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. I strongly support these cameras. As someone who does NOT commit crimes, I’m not concerned with invasion of privacy. I would prefer to have the police department awarded the tools needed to combat crime. Palm Springs is growing. Please listen to our passionate and compassionate police chief. We need to support any crime-fighting and homelessness measures that he supports. Sincerely, Peter Grame iPhone reply... 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:gobananasnet@gmail.com To:City Clerk Subject:There is good and bad in the tech we participate in. Date:Thursday, September 28, 2023 8:03:35 PM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. Dear City Council and Staff, RE: New PSPD and general City tech. No response necessary. There is both good and bad in the tech we introduce into our City. Extremely careful consideration is warranted. Here is an article interview and report by NPR involving cameras, ones that may very well be doing more than people may be aware. https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the- forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology Thank you for reading, Bob Heinbaugh & Paul Hinrichsen - Upper West Side NOrg leadership members. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 1/23 HOURLY NEWS LISTEN LIVE PLAYLIST TECHNOLOGY Sponsor Message DONATE Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology September 28, 2023 ·1:29 PM ET Heard on Fresh Air Terry Gross 42-Minute Listen Download Transcript PLAYLIST NYT reporter Kashmir Hill says Clearview AI has a database of billions of photos scraped from the internet, which it sells to governments and police departments. Her book is Your Face Belongs To Us. TERRY GROSS, HOST: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Facial recognition technology is convenient when you use it to unlock your phone or log into an app. But you might be surprised to know that your face is most likely already in a facial recognition database that can be used to identify who you are without you even being aware it's happening or knowing who's using it and why. A company expanding the technological possibilities of this technology and testing its legal and ethical limits is Clearview AI. It's a startup whose clients already include some law enforcement and government agencies. If you haven't already heard of it, it's in part because the company didn't want you to know it existed. It did its best to remain secretive until it was exposed by my guest, Kashmir Hill. She's a New York Times tech reporter who first wrote about Clearview AI in 2020. She describes her beat as the future tech dystopia and how we can try to avoid it. Kashmir has continued to report on Clearview AI and other developments in facial recognition technology. Now, she has a new book called "Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." KVCR On Air Now 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 2/23 Kashmir Hill, welcome to FRESH AIR. Tell us what the Clearview AI facial recognition technology is capable of doing. KASHMIR HILL: So the way it works is that you upload someone's face - a photo of someone - to the Clearview AI app, and then it will return to you all the places on the internet where that person's face has appeared, along with links to those photos. GROSS: So we're talking about anything that's on the internet - your photos on social media. HILL: It could lead to your Facebook profile, your Instagram account, your Venmo account, your LinkedIn profile, reveal your name, you know, possibly where you live, who your friends are. And it may well reveal photos that you didn't realize were on the internet, maybe some photos you didn't want to be there. GROSS: And you'll talk about photos you didn't know they have on you a little bit later. So let's talk about some of the nightmare scenarios that Clearview's facial recognition technology might create. HILL: So let's think about the worst-case scenarios for facial recognition technology. Some of the sensitive uses that I think about are, you know, a woman who is walking out of a Planned Parenthood and there are protesters outside, and they look at her face, take her photo, find out her identity, make assumptions that she had an abortion and, you know, write about her online or... GROSS: Mentioning her name. HILL: ...Harass her right there in the moment. Or if you are at a bar and you are talking to somebody and decide that they are creepy and you never want to talk to them again, they could take your photo and learn who you are, learn where you live, have all this information about you. For police use of this technology, you know, it can be very useful for solving crimes, but, you know, it can also be wielded in a way that could be very chilling or intimidating. Say, if there are protesters against police brutality and the government is able to very easily identify them. And we have seen this already happen in other countries, not with Clearview AI's technology but with other facial recognition technology. In China, you know, this kind of technology has been used to identify protesters in Hong Kong, to identify Uyghur Muslims and for more surprising uses like naming and shaming people who wear pajamas in public or making sure that somebody in a public restroom doesn't take too much toilet paper. They have to look at a face recognition camera, only get a little bit of toilet paper and then wait a certain amount of time until their face can unlock more. GROSS: Who would have ever thought of that? (Laughter) OK, so in the U.S., who has this Clearview facial recognition technology now? And are there restrictions on who can use it? HILL: So in the U.S. right now, I mean, Clearview AI has been used by thousands of police departments, according to Clearview AI. And it has come up in public records requests. A lot of local journalists have done reporting on their local departments using it. They have a contract with the Department of Homeland Security, they have a 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 3/23 contract with the FBI and they have received funding from both the Army and the Air Force. GROSS: So what would they use it for in the military? HILL: Well, in the military, you can imagine this being very useful for identifying strangers around military bases, you know, in cities that we're in. Clearview AI has actually given their technology for free to Ukraine to use in its war with Russia. And the Ukrainians say that they have used it to, you know, identify Russian spies who are trying to blend in with the population and they're able to search their face and see their - you know, their social media profiles that link them to Russia that show them in their military uniforms. Ukraine has also used Clearview AI to identify the corpses of Russian soldiers, soldiers who have been killed, and to find their identities, to find their social media profiles. And they have then sent those photos to their loved ones, you know, to a wife, to a mother, to a boyfriend, to a sister, to a brother, to say, look, this is your loved one. They are dead. And it was a way to try to turn the tide of public opinion in Russia against the war, to show them the toll. But a lot of people who saw that use thought it was just an incredibly, you know, chilling and disturbing use of the - of this kind of technology and more. GROSS: There are U.S. government agencies using this technology, too, right? HILL: Yes. I mean, we have some limited look at how every single agency uses the technology. So I talked to a Department of Homeland Security officer who has used Clearview AI, and he told me about a specific case in which he used it. And it was a case of child sexual abuse. He had an image that had been found in a foreign user's account in Syria, and they didn't know exactly, you know, who the abuser was or who the child was or even where this photo was taken. They were able to determine that it was in the U.S. kind of based on essentially electrical outlets. And so he used Clearview AI to search the face of the abuser and it ended up having a hit on Instagram. And it was a photo where this man appeared in the background of someone else's photo. He was - it was a photo at kind of a bodybuilding convention in Las Vegas. And this man was standing behind a workout supplements counter. And this was the breadcrumb that the DHS officer needed to find out who he was. He ended up calling the workout supplements company, you know, asking them if they knew the man. And eventually, they located him in Las Vegas and arrested him. And so it was really - you could kind of see the power of a technology like this in officers' hands. GROSS: All right. Let's take a short break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kashmir Hill. She's a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book, "Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." We'll be right back after a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF ALEXANDRE DESPLAT'S "SPY MEETING") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill. Her new book is called "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." The company she investigates, 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 4/23 Clearview AI, has developed state-of-the-art facial recognition technology that's already being used by many law enforcement agencies, as well as some government agencies. It's been used to identify criminals, including child predators. But it's also made mistakes, which have had consequences for the wrongly accused. Here's an example. HILL: Randall Reed is a man who lives in Atlanta. He's a Black man. He was driving to his mother's house the day after Thanksgiving, and he gets pulled over by a number of police officers. There was something like four police cars that pulled him over. And they get him out of the car, they start arresting him, and he has no idea why or what's going on. And they say you're under arrest. There's a warrant out for you in Louisiana for larceny. And he is bewildered. He says, I've never been to Louisiana. And it turns out there was a crime committed there, a gang of people who were buying designer purses, very expensive designer purses, from consignment stores in and around New Orleans using a stolen credit card. And they ran a surveillance still of these men, and one of them matched to Randall Reed's face. And Randall Reed ends up being held in jail in Atlanta for a week while they're waiting to extradite him. And he has to hire lawyers in Georgia, hire a lawyer in New Orleans. And the lawyer in New Orleans was able to, by basically going to one of these stores and asking for the surveillance footage - to realize that, oh, wow, this suspect actually looks a lot like my client. And this detective ends up telling him that, yes, facial recognition was used. And so Randall Reed basically takes a bunch of photos of his face and a video of his face and sends that to the police, and then the charges end up being dropped. But this was - I mean, this is incredibly traumatic. And in this case, Clearview AI was the technology that was used to identify him. And that is one of the huge problems about the use of Clearview AI is, you know, if police are using this to solve basically a shoplifting crime, they're doing that by searching this database of millions of people. You know, Clearview says that there are 30 billion faces in its database. And so this is a question that activists are asking, you know? Should we all, all of us who are in that database, be in the lineup any time a small crime is committed in a local jurisdiction? GROSS: You write that of the people who are falsely accused based on faulty recognition technology, the majority of them are people of color and that the algorithms have more trouble correctly identifying people of color than they do identifying white people, building in what is already a racial bias in the criminal justice system. Can you explain, without getting very technical, why these algorithms have more trouble identifying people of color? HILL: Yeah, I mean, this is a complicated issue. So facial recognition technology for a very long time had serious bias issues. And the reason was basically that the people working on facial recognition technology tended to be white men, and they were making sure that it worked on them. And they were using photos of white men to kind of train the AI. And the way that these systems learn - and this is the case for kind of everything from facial recognition technology to tools like ChatGPT - is that you give a computer a lot of data, and it gets very good at identifying patterns. And so if you give that computer, you know, only photos of white men or mostly photos of white men, or mostly photos of white people or mostly photos of men, it gets 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 5/23 better at identifying those people. And so, yes, this was a problem for a very long time. And there were researchers like Joy Buolamwini who pointed out that this was flawed, that it didn't work as well on darker faces, on women, on children, on older people. And that criticism was heard by the facial recognition technology industry, and they have improved these system. They have gotten more diverse faces to train the AI, and it has improved. And there have been a lot of questions raised about how they got that data. I mean, part of it is that they just turn to all of the photos of ourselves that we and others have posted on the internet. In one case, Google actually hired a contractor to go out and try to get, basically, photos of Black people. And they targeted homeless people and students. A Chinese company at one point basically offered their technology for free in Africa so that they could collect darker faces to help train their algorithms. But the technology has improved a lot since its early days when it was really, you know, quite flawed. But obviously, we are still seeing racist outcomes. Of the handful of people we know to have been wrongfully arrested for the crime of looking like someone else, in every case, the person has been Black. GROSS: So still in my mind is that you said that Clearview AI has 30 billion faces in its database. HILL: Yes, and that's many more faces than people who live on the planet. So for many individuals, there's going to be many different versions of your face. The CEO... GROSS: Oh, I see. HILL: Yeah. GROSS: So it's, like, different photos of you counted in that? HILL: Yeah. So the CEO has run searches on me. And, you know, the - I can't remember the last number, but I think it was something like there were 160 different photos of me on the internet that it was pulling up. GROSS: So Clearview AI, in developing its facial recognition technology, is responsible for technological breakthroughs, but it's also leading to a lot of questions legally and ethically about, where are the boundaries here? Is there a way to say stop when things go too far, and what is that place? You write about how Google and Facebook and maybe some other companies had developed facial recognition technology earlier but didn't want to release it. They thought it was too dangerous, so they didn't make it available. Can you expand on that for us? HILL: This was a really surprising finding for me. You know, when I first got wind of Clearview AI in the fall of 2019 and started talking to experts, people were shocked that this company came out of nowhere and built this radical tool unlike anything, you know, released by the big technology giants or even by the U.S. government. And everyone thought that it was something they had done technologically. But what I found since then in working on the book is that actually Google had talked about developing something like this as early as 2011, and its then chairman, Eric Schmidt, said that it was the one technology that Google built but decided to hold back. And that was because they were worried about the dangerous ways it could be used by, say, a dictator to control his or her citizens. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 6/23 And I discovered that Facebook too developed something like this. I actually got to watch this video of engineers who work there in this conference room in Menlo Park. And they had rigged up a smartphone on the brim of a baseball cap. And when the guy who was wearing it turned to look at somebody, the smartphone would call out the name of the person he was looking at. But Facebook to decide to hold it back. And that is, you know, pretty surprising from Google and Facebook. They are such boundary pushing companies. They have really changed our notions of privacy. But they both felt that they didn't want to be first with this technology, that it was unethical, potentially illegal. But Clearview, you know, didn't have those same concerns. It was this new radical startup, a very unusual background, and it just wanted to make its mark on the world. And the building blocks were there for them to do this. You know, countless photos of people on the internet that are not very well protected against the kind of scraping or mass downloading that Clearview did. And then these facial recognition algorithms that are just easier to develop now if you have some technical savvy because the open source - what's called the open source community around these technologies has kind of shared them online. And so what Clearview did was just what others weren't willing to do. I call it ethical arbitrage in the book. And what is so alarming about that is it means that there will be other Clearview AIs and there already are. GROSS: Well, a paradox here is that although Google and Facebook developed facial recognition technology, they decided it was too potentially dangerous and withheld it from public use. However, hasn't Clearview AI harvested faces through Google and from Facebook? HILL: Clearview AI has scraped photos from millions of websites, including Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Venmo, YouTube. Yes, you know, it has taken photos from these companies, some of these companies like Facebook especially who convinced us to put our photos online alongside our faces. They did offer the building blocks that that Clearview AI has used. And, you know, after I reported what Clearview AI had done, many of these companies sent cease-and-desist letters to Clearview AI saying stop scraping our sites and delete the photos that you collected from our sites and, you know, said it violates our terms of service. But then they didn't do anything else besides send those letters. There hasn't been a lawsuit against Clearview AI. And as far as I know, as I understand, Clearview AI has not deleted any of those photos. And I think it's continuing to scrape those sites. GROSS: It's time to take another break, so let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kashmir Hill. She's a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book, "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." We'll be right back after we take a short break. I'm Terry Gross, and this is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC) GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. I'm Terry Gross. Let's get back to my interview with Kashmir Hill, author of the new book "Your Face Belongs to Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." It's about a company called Clearview AI that's expanding the technological possibilities of facial recognition technology and testing its legal and ethical limits. It's a startup whose clients already include some law 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 7/23 enforcement agencies and government agencies. She exposed them. It had been a very secretive company. She exposed them in a 2020 article for The New York Times. How has this affected your use of social media and putting your picture online? They already have your photos, but still. HILL: So I think a lot of people get hopeless about privacy or feel like, what can I do to protect myself? I do think that people can make choices that will protect them, but it's also a societal responsibility. So for me personally, I am a fairly public person. I have many photos on the internet. But when I post photos of my children, for example, I tend to do so privately on, you know, a private - you know, privately on Instagram, just for friends and family. Or I text photos, you know, share with my friends. I am much more private about their images knowing that this technology is out there. It is also the case that people can get themselves, in some places, taken out of these databases, so that is advice that I give people, you know? It's not just a matter of being careful what you post. If you live in certain states that protect your face better, you can go to Clearview AI and ask for access to the information they have on you and ask them to delete it. There are privacy laws that give you those rights in California, Connecticut, Virginia, Colorado. And so, yeah, if you're a citizen of one of those states, if you're a resident of one of those states, you can get out of Clearview AI's database. And that is a kind of hopeful part of this book, is that we don't have to just give in to the whims of technology and what it's capable of. We can constrain what's possible with a legal framework, you know? We can pass privacy laws and enforce them, and that will help protect us against what is now becoming possible with technology. GROSS: You know, a lot of us already use facial recognition technology in our private lives, like, to use it to unlock your phone or log on to an app. Do you use it? Like, what are your thoughts about that in terms of what you're exposing yourself to, if anything? HILL: Yeah, I mean, people think that because I'm a privacy reporter, I must be a complete - I must have everything on lockdown. But I am a normal person who lives my life in normal ways. It's part of how I get ideas for stories, is just seeing how we interact with the world and what happens when my information is out there. So you know, I do unlock my phone with my face. When I was traveling to do research for this book, I went to London because they have police vans there, these mobile vans that they send out with facial recognition cameras on the roof to scan crowds and pick up wanted people off the streets. And so I really wanted to go there and have that part of what's happening with facial recognition technology in the book. And when I got to Heathrow Airport, rather than having to wait for hours in line, you know, for a customs agent to look at my passport, I just put it on a little scanner bed, looked into a camera - and there is a biometric chip on your passport that has your face print - and it matched me to the passport and just let me right in. I mean, there are many beneficial uses of facial recognition technology, and it's part of why I wanted to write this book, because I wanted people to understand it doesn't need to be an all or nothing situation. I hope that we can harness the beneficial uses of facial recognition technology that are convenient to us, that make our lives better, without having to embrace this completely dystopian, you know, world in which facial 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 8/23 recognition technology is running all the time on all the cameras, on everybody's phone. And anywhere you go, people can know who you are and, you know, have it just end anonymity as we know it. GROSS: That's a chilling thought. Let's talk about how you first found out about Clearview AI, because it had been doing everything in its power to prevent the public from knowing about it. How did you first find out it existed? HILL: So I got a tip in the fall of 2019 from a public records researcher who had been looking into, you know, what types of facial recognition technology police were using, you know, which companies, how much they were paying for it. And he had gotten this 26-page PDF from the Atlanta Police Department. And it included this company that he hadn't heard of before - there wasn't much online - called Clearview AI that claimed that it had scraped billions of photos from the internet, including social media sites, and that it was selling it to hundreds of law enforcement agencies. And there was a really surprising, privileged and confidential legal memo that the Atlanta Police Department turned over written by Paul Clement, who is - used to be one of the top lawyers in the country. He was the solicitor general under George W. Bush. He had written this memo for police to reassure them that they could use Clearview AI without breaking the law. And this just caught my attention right away. And I started digging in. And, you know, the more I dug, the stranger this company seemed. GROSS: Well, you couldn't find their office. You couldn't find anyone to talk with. What were some of the obstacles you ran into? HILL: So... GROSS: I mean, you found their address, but you couldn't find a building. HILL: Yeah. So one of the strangest things was, you know, they had a very basic website. And it just described what they were doing as artificial intelligence for a better world. And there was an office address there. And it happened to be just a few blocks away from The New York Times. And so I mapped on Google Maps, I walked over, and I got to where it was supposed to be and the building did not exist. And that was very strange to me. I also looked them up, you know, on the internet. And they had only one employee on LinkedIn. His name was John Good. He only had two connections on the site. It definitely looked like a fake person. You know, I reached out to that John Good and never got a response. You know, I called everyone I could find that seemed to have some connection to the company. No one would call me back. And so then I turned to police officers, trying to find people using the app, and that's where I had success. I talked to officers who had used it. They said it was incredible. It worked like nothing they had ever used before. But through the process of talking to police officers, I discovered that Clearview AI was tracking me, that they had put an alert on my face. And every time one of these officers uploaded my photo to try to show me what the results were like, they were getting a call from Clearview AI and being told to stop talking to me. And Clearview AI actually blocked my face for a while from having any results. And that was very chilling to me because I realized, well, one, this company is - has this power to see who law 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 9/23 enforcement is looking for, and they're using it on me, and also that they had the ability to control whether or not a person could be found. GROSS: Yeah. But you were able to see what pictures they had of you. And they had photos of you that you didn't know existed, including photos where you're, like, buried in the background. But it was still able to identify that photo as you. Tell us about some of the most surprising photos that were harvested. HILL: Yeah. So eventually the company did talk to me. They hired a very seasoned crisis communications consultant. And so I was able to meet Hoan Ton-That, who is the technical co-founder of Clearview AI. And he has since run my face through the app, you know, several times. And in one case, it brought up this photo that I recognized as being taken in Washington, D.C. And there's - you know, there's somebody in the foreground and somebody on the sidewalk in the background walking by. And I was looking at the photo, and I didn't immediately see me until I recognized that the person in profile in the background of the photo was wearing a coat that I bought in - at an American vintage store in Tokyo many, many years ago. And so I realized, wow, that's me. I can even recognize myself with my human eyes that that's me. But this - you know, this algorithm is able to find me. There was a photo on the internet of somebody I had been talking to for a story, and that made me realize I may need to be much more careful with sensitive sources out in public if something like this is - becomes more ubiquitous because I won't anymore be able to trust necessarily that if I leave my, you know, phone at home and meet them at a dive bar - that someone can't make the connection between us. So, yeah, it was just very surprising. I even, at one point, covered my mouth and nose, you know, the way that you would with a COVID mask. And even then, Hoan Ton-That was still able to take a photo of me and bring up other photos of me. It really is astounding how far this technology has come from its early days, when it was very buggy and didn't work very well. GROSS: So it can identify you even if you're wearing a mask. That's remarkable. Have you tried to get your own face removed from Clearview AI's database? HILL: Well, unfortunately, I am a resident of New York, and so I do not have the privacy protections that other people in the U.S. or people outside of the U.S. have. So I can't get Clearview AI to delete the photos of me. GROSS: Oh, so it's only people in other countries who have that ability. HILL: So people in Europe have this ability. And then there are states in this country that have privacy laws that give them the right to access and delete information that companies have on them. So if you live in California, Colorado, Virginia or Connecticut, you can go to Clearview AI and get your information deleted. And if you're in Illinois, you're protected by an extra special law that specifically protects your face. But the rest of us are out of luck. GROSS: Let me reintroduce you. If you're just joining us, my guest is New York Times tech reporter Kashmir Hill. She's the author of the new book "Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest to End Privacy As We Know It." It's about facial recognition technology and the company Clearview AI. We'll be right back. This is FRESH AIR. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 10/23 (SOUNDBITE OF THE WEE TRIO'S "LOLA") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Kashmir Hill. She's a New York Times tech reporter and author of the new book "Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." It's about the company Clearview AI and its quest to develop facial recognition technology and all the successes it's had and all the failures it's had so far, how it's testing the ethical and legal limits of use of this technology. You know, we talked about how law enforcement agencies, some government agencies, the military is using or is interested in using this technology from this company. What about private corporations? Are any of them using it? HILL: So Clearview AI, when they were first pitching this technology, did want private corporations to use it. They were pitching it to grocery stores and hotels and real estate buildings. One of the people they pitched, actually, was John Catsimatidis, who's a businessman in New York, has run for mayor there, owns the Gristedes grocery stores. And part of their pitch was that they would give the app actually to potential investors and to these businesspeople. And so John Catsimatidis told me they thought about using it. They had a lot of Haagen-Dazs thieves at his stores at the time, and so they tested it. They didn't ultimately install Clearview AI's Technology. But he himself loved having the app on his phone, and he told me about how he used it one time when his daughter walked into an Italian restaurant when he was dining there and she was with a date he didn't recognize. And so he had a waiter take a picture of the couple so he could identify who the man was, which I thought was a really, really shocking use. So Clearview AI has agreed not to sell its database to companies and to only sell it to police agencies. But there are other facial recognition technologies out there. And I think the most notable example of this is Madison Square Garden, the big events venue in New York City. They own Radio City Music Hall and the Beacon Theater, and they installed facial recognition technology a few years ago to keep out security threats. But in the last year, the owner, James Dolan, decided that he wanted to use the technology to keep out his enemies - namely lawyers who worked for firms that had sued him. And so Madison Square Garden ended up making a list of these 90 firms that had lawsuits against it, scraping the lawyers' photos from their own websites and creating a face ban on these people so that when they tried to go to a Knicks game or Rangers game or a Mariah Carey concert, they get turned away at the door, and they're told, sorry, you're not welcome here until you drop your suit against us. And yeah, I mean, it's a really incredible deployment of this technology and shows how chilling the uses could be, that you might be, you know, turned away from a company because of where you work, because maybe - I could imagine a future in which a company turns you away because you wrote a bad Yelp review or they don't like your political leanings. GROSS: You went with a lawyer who is on the banned list of Madison Square Garden to see if the technology actually prevented her from getting in. And it did. It worked. HILL: Yeah. It was incredible. I mean, we - so I went with her. I can't remember if it was a Rangers game or a Knicks game, but I bought our tickets, so it was not under her name, not, you know, associated with her in any conceivable way. And we walked 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 11/23 through the door to the stadium and put our purses - our bags down on, you know, the security belt, walked through the metal detector, and a security guard immediately walked up to her. And he asked for her ID, she showed it. And he said, you know, you're going to have to stand here for a moment. My manager's coming over. And he came over and he said, hey, you work for this firm. You know, you're not allowed to come into the stadium. And she said, well, I'm not working on the case, you know, against your company. It's other lawyers in my firm. He says it doesn't matter. Everybody from your firm is banned. He gave her a note and kicked us out. And I mean, it happened, you know, within a minute of our walking through the door. GROSS: Let's take another break here, and then we'll talk some more. If you're just joining us, my guest is Kashmir Hill, a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the book "Your Face Belongs To Us." We'll be right back after we take a short break. This is FRESH AIR. (SOUNDBITE OF THE MIDNIGHT HOUR'S "BETTER ENDEAVOR") GROSS: This is FRESH AIR. Let's get back to my interview with Kashmir Hill. She's a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book, "Your Face Belongs To Us: A Secretive Startup's Quest To End Privacy As We Know It." The startup referred to in the title is Clearview AI, and it's a company that has advanced facial recognition technology. And it's raised a lot of questions about the ethical and legal limits of this technology. Let's talk a little bit about the founder of Clearview AI, and the CEO, Hoan Ton-That. Part of his background was that he was a MAGA supporter. What are his connections to Donald Trump and to the far right? HILL: Yeah. So Hoan Ton-That, he grew up in Australia. He dropped out of college at 19, moved to San Francisco and he was actually kind of part of a liberal crowd when he lived in San Francisco. And grew his hair long, was a musician, hung out with artists. But then around 2015, he moved to New York, and this seemed to be a time when his politics really shifted. He would later tell me that he was radicalized by the internet, but he started following a lot of people on the far right, you know, Milo Yiannopoulos, Breitbart writers. He started hanging out with a guy named Charles Johnson, known as Chuck Johnson on the internet, who is very much a conservative provocateur, ran a very conservative news site that did what a lot of people described as race baiting. And Hoan Ton-That and Charles Johnson decided to go to the Republican National Convention together in 2016, where Trump was being anointed the candidate. And yeah, they were very much all in on Trump. And while they were there, they actually met with Peter Thiel, who, you know, was a big Trump supporter, and he was speaking at the convention. Peter Thiel would later become their first investor in Clearview AI before it was even called Clearview AI, when it was called Smart Checker. But that is where the company started. It did start very much within conservative circles in politics. GROSS: What does that tell you, if anything, about how Clearview AI is using facial recognition technology? I mean, one of the fears is that, like, authoritarian governments could use this for nefarious purposes. And Trump, who the founders of the company - or at least most of the founders of the company - supported, he definitely has authoritarian tendencies. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 12/23 HILL: I mean, one of the first ways that Clearview AI was used before it was called that - it was still called Smart Checker at the time - was at the DeploraBall, which was this event in D.C. when Trump was becoming president. And Hoan Ton-That, you know, later said in documents about it that they had used the technology to keep anti-fascists - antifa - from being able to get into this event. And they revealed that in a pitch they made to the Hungarian government. They were trying to sell their tool for border security. And, you know, Hungary, I think many would describe as an authoritarian government. And they said that they had fine-tuned the technology so that it could be used to identify people who are affiliated with George Soros and the Open Foundations Society. So specifically, they were trying to sell the technology to an authoritarian government to try to identify and keep out people that are affiliated with kind of civil liberties. So it was very disturbing. But now Hoan Ton-That says that, you know, he is apolitical. He kind of says he doesn't hold those old views anymore. And, in fact, Clearview AI was used on January 6 when rioters stormed the Capitol. The FBI had photos of all these people because many of them were filming themselves on social media and posting photos online, and they weren't wearing masks. And so many police departments started running their photos through Clearview AI to identify them. GROSS: You know, I can't help but wonder. Even if this technology is regulated, what's the likelihood it's going to escape into the wild anyway? And what I'm thinking of specifically is we write about - I think it was a potential investor who was given this technology so he could better understand it, and he let his daughter play with it, and she played with it with her friends. So, like, if a potential investor in the company who has been pitched all about it and knows what the boundaries are supposed to be lets his daughter use it and share it with friends, what does that say about the potential of this, just no matter how controlled it is, getting out into hands it's not supposed to be in? HILL: So Clearview AI, yes, in its early days was used by, yeah, all of these investors, even celebrities were using the technology. Joe Montana at one point emailed Hoan Ton-That because he wanted access to help him remember people's names when he met them. The thing is - so Clearview AI, because of all the blowback, because it has faced such public scrutiny, is limiting its technology to police and security use. But, you know, as we were talking about earlier, there are other people who can do what Clearview AI has done and they have. There is a public face search engine right now called PimEyes, and it does not have as robust a database as Clearview AI. It hasn't scraped as many sites, hasn't scraped social media sites. It hasn't accumulated as many photos. But yeah, I mean, I could upload your face right now to PimEyes, and I would get results. I would get photos of you potentially, along with links to where they appear. And, you know, I have run PimEyes on myself. It pulls up many photos of me, not as many as Clearview AI. I ran it on my then-5-year-old daughter and had a hit, something I'd forgotten, a photo of her on the internet. PimEyes does let you ask for results to be removed. I did for my own daughter. I mean, the cat is very much getting out of the bag, and it's part of why I wrote this book right now is because we need to figure out what we want or this will become very widespread. GROSS: Kashmir Hill, thank you so much for your reporting and your new book. I hope this isn't really the end of privacy as we know it, but... (laughter). 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 13/23 Updates from NPR's Climate Solution Week and beyond Our reporting teams have scoured the world for solutions to climate change. This week, they're sharing what they found. Follow along by signing up for our daily newsletter. See more subscription options By subscribing, you acknowledge and agree to NPR's Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. NPR may share your name and email address with your NPR station. See Details. Email address SUBSCRIBE More Stories From NPR HILL: Thank you, Terry. And I do think there is hope for privacy. GROSS: Oh, good to hear. OK. Thanks so much. Kashmir Hill is a tech reporter for The New York Times and author of the new book "Your Face Belongs To Us." If you'd like to catch up on FRESH AIR interviews you missed, like our interviews with Leslie Jones, who has a new memoir, or Kerry Washington, who has a new one too, or songwriter, singer and musician Allison Russell, check out our podcast. You'll find lots of FRESH AIR interviews. And if you haven't already subscribed to our free newsletter, give it a shot. It will give you something enjoyable to read about our show and the people who produce it. You'll get it in your mailbox every Saturday morning. You can subscribe at whyy.org/freshair. FRESH AIR's executive producer is Danny Miller. Our technical director and engineer is Audrey Bentham. Our interviews and reviews are produced and edited by Amy Salit, Phyllis Myers, Roberta Shorrock, Ann Marie Baldonado, Sam Briger, Lauren Krenzel, Heidi Saman, Therese Madden, Seth Kelley and Susan Nyakuindi. Our digital media producer is Molly Seavy-Nesper. Thea Chaloner directed today's show. Our co-host is Tonya Mosley. I'm Terry Gross. Copyright © 2023 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information. NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 14/23 MOVIE REVIEWS 'The Creator' is based on big ideas — and a lot of spare parts NATIONAL How rumors and conspiracy theories got in the way of Maui's fire recovery 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 15/23 BUSINESS U.S. sues Amazon in a monopoly case that could be existential for the retail giant HISTORY Horseless carriages were once a lot like driverless cars. What can history teach us? 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 16/23 BUSINESS 2 Black TikTok workers claim discrimination: Both were fired after complaining to HR BUSINESS Having a hard time finding Clorox wipes? Blame it on a cyberattack Popular on NPR.org 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N 10/2/23, 8:36 AM Exposing the secretive company at the forefront of facial recognition technology : NPR https://www.npr.org/2023/09/28/1202310781/exposing-the-secretive-company-at-the-forefront-of-facial-recognition-technology 17/23 EUROPE In France, workers build a castle from scratch the 13th century way NATIONAL SECURITY Who's in the Army now? 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Note: all answers displaying "*****" are marked as sensitive and must be viewed after your login. Full Name/Nombre George O City of Residence/Ciudad de residencia Palm Springs, Phone (optional) /Teléfono (opcional) Email (optional/opcional) Your Comments/Sus comentarios I am vehemently in opposition to the FLOCK cameras, including the cameras currently on the Parking Enforcement vehicles. These sort of cameras and their capability to build an Orwellian surveillance grid are not acceptable for our city. Read the room, Palm Springs is a beautiful place to escape to, a refuge, a safe haven. Not one where the agenda of “15 minute cities” and various other World Economic Forum tyranny can find its home. Look up these terms and understand that Palm Springs will not comply with these agendas. The software in these cameras have backdoors, will be used and abused for objectives beyond your understanding. If the past 3 years are indicative of anything, it is that freedom is dissipating quickly & we must be stand strong in not welcoming a world of surveillance turning us into free range tax slaves. Whether you are on the dole & part of government or just an everyday citizen, you will not like where this sort of track and trace technology will lead. Thank you, City of Palm Springs This is an automated message generated by Granicus. Please do not reply directly to this email. 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:david.vignolo@verizon.net To:Christy Holstege; Lisa Middleton; Ron deHarte; Grace Garner; Jeffrey Bernstein Cc:mitchell.bill56@gmail.com; Alyssa Chavez; Liza Chavez; City Clerk Subject:Vote to approve license plate reader cameras Date:Wednesday, September 27, 2023 11:21:18 AM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. Good morning Mayor Garner, Mayor pro tem Bernstein and Councilmembers Holstege, deHarte, and Middleton: We strongly urge you to vote to approve the request by the Palm Springs Police Department (PSPD) to purchase 15 license plate readers (LPR) that would be permanently mounted at the city’s entrances and exits. We feel that the concerns about the potential for governmental overreach, data leaks, and invasion of privacy with these cameras have been adequately addressed by the PSPD’ in their policy for their use. As Chief Mills noted, an existing state law prevents the LPR data from being shared outside of California law enforcement, the system will only be used by a select few trained users, and it logs who accesses the data and when to prevent misuse of the data. When this issue is reconsidered at your October 12th Council meeting, we hope you will all vote to approve the funding request and help the PSPD address the increasing problem of speed and red-light running in our city. Thank you and we look forward to hearing from each of you as to your evolving position. We would appreciate the City Clerk ensuring these comments are accepted into the public record as we will be unable to personally deliver them at the October 12th meeting. Thank you. Respectfully, David A. Vignolo and Bill Mitchell 2041 S Madrona Drive Palm Springs, CA 92264-9220 (202) 409-5113 – David / (443) 545-4509 - Bill 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Christy Holstege To:david.vignolo@verizon.net Cc:Jeffrey Bernstein; mitchell.bill56@gmail.com; Alyssa Chavez; Liza Chavez; City Clerk; Lauren Wolfer Subject:Re: Vote to approve license plate reader cameras Date:Wednesday, September 27, 2023 1:12:52 PM Thanks for your comments. Here are some of the concerns that I will investigate with Flock. It’s not a question of PSPD’s policy (though just so you know, we were unintentionally sharing data across state lines until earlier this year despite state law; that’s why it’s our job to analyze these policies instead of blindly accepting them), but questions about this third party corporations policies and if we should do business with this out of state, large tech corporations, which has had significant issues in California, despite existing CA law, some leading to liability and lawsuits against cities and police departments. https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/2023/06/28/how-california-license-plate- cameras-could-aid-abortion-prosecutions/70357602007/ https://www.desertsun.com/story/news/local/coachella/2023/08/18/coachella-rejects-license- plate-readers-privacy-concerns-sheriff-chad-bianco/70586085007/ I appreciate your comments and will definitely consider them as we do our due diligence to ensure the city, PSPD, and our residents and visitors are adequately protected by the company and contract for these services. I believe our residents want us to do that work so we continue to protect civil rights and liberties in Palm Springs, especially for communities who are under attack nationwide. Best, Christy Gilbert Holstege, Esq. Councilmember District 4 City of Palm Springs On Sep 27, 2023, at 11:21 AM, david.vignolo@verizon.net wrote: NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. Good morning Mayor Garner, Mayor pro tem Bernstein and Councilmembers Holstege, deHarte, and Middleton: We strongly urge you to vote to approve the request by the Palm Springs Police Department (PSPD) to purchase 15 license plate readers (LPR) that would be permanently mounted at the city’s entrances and exits. We feel that the concerns about the potential for governmental overreach, data leaks, and 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N invasion of privacy with these cameras have been adequately addressed by the PSPD’ in their policy for their use. As Chief Mills noted, an existing state law prevents the LPR data from being shared outside of California law enforcement, the system will only be used by a select few trained users, and it logs who accesses the data and when to prevent misuse of the data. When this issue is reconsidered at your October 12th Council meeting, we hope you will all vote to approve the funding request and help the PSPD address the increasing problem of speed and red-light running in our city. Thank you and we look forward to hearing from each of you as to your evolving position. We would appreciate the City Clerk ensuring these comments are accepted into the public record as we will be unable to personally deliver them at the October 12th meeting. Thank you. Respectfully, David A. Vignolo and Bill Mitchell 2041 S Madrona Drive Palm Springs, CA 92264-9220 (202) 409-5113 – David / (443) 545-4509 - Bill 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:Brett Smith To:City Clerk Subject:Approval of 15 ALPR cameras for Palm Springs Date:Thursday, September 28, 2023 8:27:29 AM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. To Members of City Council: It is time for us to give additional support to our police department by approving the installation of license plate readers produced by Flock Safety. Over the years, Palm Springs has begun to mirror the negative behaviors found in Los Angeles, San Diego, Orange County, and San Francisco. Crime is on the upswing, complete with rampant shoplifting, speeding dangerously on our roadways, and invasion on our properties, vehicles, and stores. My HOA agreed to install cameras on our property to help lessen the effects of vandalism and dumpster usage by non-residents. It has worked. We now experience an occasional disturbance, but not like what we were experiencing a year ago. Our police department, led by Chief Mills, are working overtime to deal with "big city issues" in our small, but growing city. They need whatever assistance can be provided so that residents and visitors feel safe in Palm Springs. It is pretty simple: Follow the rules of society, and you are fine. If you choose to break the laws, then you deserve the consequences. It's time for us to be more proactive toward crime, before we end up in the news with negative press like that which is happening in San Francisco, Portland, Seattle, New York, etc.... Brett Smith Palm Springs 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N From:suzykindel To:City Clerk Subject:Fwd: Please approve the installation of the ALPR cameras Date:Wednesday, October 4, 2023 1:06:26 PM NOTICE: This message originated outside of The City of Palm Springs -- DO NOT CLICK on links or open attachments unless you are sure the content is safe. ---------- Forwarded message --------- From: suzykindel <suzykindel@gmail.com> Date: Wed, Oct 4, 2023 at 1:01 PM Subject: Please approve the installation of the ALPR cameras To: <Grace.Garner@palmspringsca.gov>, <Jeffrey.Bernstein@palmspringsca.gov>, <Ron.deHarte@palmspringsca.gov>, <Christy.Holstege@palmspringsca.gov>, <Lisa.Middleton@palmspringsca.gov> Dear City Council: I urge you to approve our police department’s request for the Flock Safety cameras. I attended the HOA meeting for Tahquitz Creek Golf Neighborhood when the representative of Flock and Lt. Hutchinson made their presentation. At that meeting the HOA via residents’ donations agreed to install two cameras at the entrances to that neighborhood. I have arranged for a similar presentation to have 6 cameras installed at the entrances to my complex: Palm Springs Golf and Tennis Club. Having your approval for 15 cameras for the police department will help convince my board to upgrade our security. If approved our city would have a total of 23 cameras and be a safer place to live! Thank you. -- Suzy -- Suzy 09/26/2023 Public Comment Item 1N