Lawsuit: City cameras make it impossible to drive anywhere without being tracked

“Crystal finds all of this deeply intrusive… Crystal worries about how the Flock Cameras are eroding not just her privacy, but her clients’ privacy, too,” the complaint said.

In a press release, the Institute for Justice claimed that “Norfolk has created a dragnet that allows the government to monitor everyone’s day-to-day movements without a warrant or probable cause. This type of mass surveillance is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment.”

The group says that Flock’s cameras aren’t like “traditional traffic cameras… [which] capture an image only when they sense speeding or someone running a red light.” Instead, Flock’s system captures images of every car and retains the images for at least 30 days, the group said.

“It’s no surprise that surveillance systems like Norfolk’s have been repeatedly abused,” the group said. “In Kansas, officials were caught using Flock to stalk their exes, including one police chief who used Flock 228 times over four months to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles. In California, several police departments violated California law by sharing data from their license plate reader database with other departments across the country.”

Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint tech

Flock’s Vehicle Fingerprint technology “includes the color and make of the car and any distinctive features, like a bumper sticker or roof rack” and makes those details searchable in the database, the lawsuit said. The complaint describes how officers can use the Flock technology:

All of that surveillance creates a detailed record of where every driver in Norfolk has gone. Anyone with access to the database can go back in time and see where a car was on any given day. And they can track its movements across at least the past 30 days, creating a detailed map of the driver’s movements. Indeed, the City’s police chief has boasted that “it would be difficult to drive anywhere of any distance without running into a camera somewhere.” In Norfolk, no one can escape the government’s 172 unblinking eyes. And the City’s dragnet is only expanding: On September 24, 2024, the Chief of Police announced plans to acquire 65 more cameras in the future.

The cameras make this surveillance not just possible, but easy. Flock provides advanced search and artificial intelligence functions. The sort of tracking that would have taken days of effort, multiple officers, and significant resources just a decade ago now takes just a few mouse clicks. City officers can output a list of locations a car has been seen, create lists of cars that visited specific locations, and even track cars that are often seen together.

In its statement today, Flock said that “appellate and federal district courts in at least fourteen states have upheld the use of evidence from license plate readers as constitutional without requiring a warrant, as well as the 9th and 11th circuits.”