When the Data Gets it Wrong, Who Pays the Price?

Now, some of that is true, and we should say so plainly.

Flock cameras have helped many police agencies find real suspects and plenty of departments swear by them on a day-to-day basis.

Now, here is what you were not told, though, in that same process, that that same camera system is one node in a private surveillance grid of more than 100,000 cameras owned by one company, Flock Safety, and it was quietly wired so that the federal government can reach into the system and get what they need from time to time.

Now, when you're looking at home here in Texas, Fox's license to operate in Texas expired on September 30th, 2024, but that didn't stop them from operating.

GPS told them to stop, but they kept the cameras running.

And for 14 months, they did so until the license was quietly renewed last December.

14 months unlicensed watching over Texas roads.

Now, Flock called it an administrative oversight, an error, but in Baytown, the police chief just shut the feed off.

Then there was us.

City Council killed the Flock contract in June of last year over exactly these same privacy concerns.

Now, when you're Rewinding the lens and looking at this more broadly, 53 cities across the country have canceled their flock contracts.

They often found that their federal agencies, from ICE to Customs and Border Protection, FBI, ATF, could search their local camera systems without the city ever signing off on it.

Your neighbor's movements logged and searchable by an agency that's 2,000 miles away, and nobody in the room really voted for it.

When you look at Los Angeles, they audited their flocks alerts and one in three flags for a stolen car came back wrong.

One in three.

Every one of those was an otherwise innocent driver who could have been ordered out of their car at gunpoint because a database made a mistake saying that they were driving a stolen car.

One in three people.

Now, we pay for all of it.

Our tax dollars bought the polls, bought the cameras, bought the systems, signed the contracts, and feed the grid.

And there's little that the public generally knows about it.

But there's a fight growing now with some beginning to push back on them more vocally than ever before, while others argue that they are a safety necessity and we need to be embracing them, especially in this new age.

So how do you feel about it? I'd love to know because they're growing in many cities and they're probably not going away immediately.

At the very least, I think we can all agree that we should be able to have more oversight over systems like this.

Cross-jurisdiction data sharing cooperation should be very clear and explicit and told to the public when it's approved.

Information like that goes a long way in terms of safety and in terms of public trust.