License-plate reading tech that Cambridge’s City Council approved in February is now causing alarm over use of its data by the federal government and other law enforcement agencies. On Monday councillors asked the city manager to consider the implications before they get installed.
While city manager Yi-An Huang didn’t give an immediate response about undoing plans to use the Flock Safety readers, he signaled to councillors that he understood the concerns.
“We are learning a lot very quickly about what the federal administration is doing and how federal agencies are interacting with vendors,” Huang said. “In normal times, I would say I feel really good about our policies and approaches, and that we’re being very careful. A lot of the rules are being changed in real time on us, and so I think it is worth us looking at this policy order and digging into this a bit more.”
All councillors supported taking a second look at a deal that they approved Feb. 3 on a 6-3 vote, with those opposed at the time being Patty Nolan, Sumbul Siddiqui and Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler – the same councillors sponsoring the new order calling a red alert on the tech’s likely abuse.
The cameras were pitched in February by Cambridge police as being for “legitimate law enforcement purposes” and public safety, such as helping to find “missing and endangered persons, and identifying and removing stolen motor vehicles.” The 15 to 20 solar-powered devices to be installed throughout the city were estimated to cost $3,000 a year each, with costs “in part or entirely” picked up the federal Urban Area Security Initiative grant program.
https://embed.documentcloud.org/documents/26086429-250908-surveillance-tech-license-plate-readers/?embed=1
A test of the system by Boston ended with that city choosing not to share data, noted Nolan in an amendment to the new order. But Flock systems are controversial nationwide, and an ACLU commentary that Nolan cites says that “Flock’s system is undergoing insidious expansion across multiple dimensions.”
“It’s safe to say that even many who support the use of ALPR programs by their local police to catch local criminals do not support funneling the data that is collected to the Trump administration and those carrying out its abusive and often unlawful immigration program,” the civil rights organization said, using a term for automatic license plate readers.
Public opposition heard
The matter has arrived on Cambridge’s doorstep, residents said during public comment at Monday’s meeting. “Every day we see new signs of our authoritarian federal government. We see [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] raids today on communities across Massachusetts. We’ve seen how they occupied L.A., D.C., Chicago, and how they’re threatening the same in Boston,” attorney Siobhan McDonough said. “All of this is enabled by the military and surveillance contractors who arm them, equip them and spy on our communities.”
Though Flock has made promises about not sharing data with the federal government – which civil liberties groups have found to be untrue – “private surveillance salesmen will tell you what you want to hear in order to get you to buy their products,” McDonough said. “They don’t care about our communities.”
A representative of the civil liberties group Digital Fourth also spoke Monday. Alex Marthews warned the council that Flock has expanded its features “to uncover patterns of movement of vehicles that are based on what an AI algorithm flags as being suspicious – it doesn’t have to be connected to a crime.”
“What we’re doing here is allowing the deployment of cameras outside public housing that would swing the government’s eye of suspicion toward random civilians whose travel patterns just happen to fit what the algorithm detects as being anomalous,” Marthews said – a kind of science fiction style of “precrime” detection based on widely discredited artificial intelligence tech.
Local information in a national database
Councillor Paul Toner interjected before the Monday vote that as the order was written,“we’re not going to forgo implementing this … this is to clarify whether we think we need to make any adjustments.” But he looked for city staff to reassert that Cambridge would control the camera’s data and not share it with anybody.
Sobrinho-Wheeler noted that Cambridge wouldn’t even own the cameras – they are paid for by the federal government and technically only leased from Flock.
“That data goes into a national database that is accessible to cities all over the country,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said. He referred to a report of a police officer in Texas who used the system to search for a woman who’d left the state to get an abortion.
“Other cities that had previously adopted this technology are raising the same concerns now that it’s become clear that this data can be accessed, and there are real concerns about sharing with Ice and other organizations,” Sobrinho-Wheeler said.
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This deal needs to be canceled and the equipment removed. Security, Privacy and Civil Liberties experts all weighed in and the Council ignored their concerns and the reputation of the company involved. Again and again a majority of the council keeps assuming that the Feds and corporations will not turn us into a police state – That is EXACTLY what Corporate Fascism wants you to do, ignore the facts and trust them to be the gatekeepers and ‘big brother’ over us all.
One of these was installed on Rindge near Mass Ave in June. It’s already happening, folks.
The whole City Council needs to be replaced. Everything that they are approving for the last few years looks like they’re working for the real estate industry. Now it looks like what Trump wants, control of the public, not interested in what we want.
The City Manager should not be in control of this. No citizen one voted for him. The council needs to actually take some positive action and stop this program now. Patty Nolan is on the right track but is not getting the support she needs and the manager left to his own devices will not act in the best interests of the public regarding safeguarding privacy. anyone who thinks the Feds won’t grab that data is being willfully ignorant and not safeguarding our interests.