National Surveillance Camera Rollout Roils Privacy Activists

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While controversy over the potential overreach of neighborhood and law-enforcement video surveillance has focused mainly on Ring, an Atlanta-based startup has quietly rolled out its own network of smart surveillance cameras across the country that is again raising questions of privacy and the ire of some advocating it, according to a published report.
 
Flock Safety promises to protect neighborhoods with smart cameras with automated license plate recognition (ALPR) technology that are sold to homeowners associations, businesses or law enforcement and are designed to automatically read vehicle license plates “up to 75 MPH, day & night, up to 75 ft. away,” according to the company’s website.
 
Ostensibly, ALPR—which has been around for years but is gaining new momentum thanks to its integration with smart cameras–is aimed at protecting citizens. However, a published report suggests that Flock may be overstretching its wings and has expanded to do much more than merely provide a virtual neighborhood watch.
 
Vice Motherboard reported Wednesday that Flock has quietly built up an extensive nationwide network of its cameras called TALON that are maintained by law-enforcement and offer up to 500 million scans of vehicles a month, according to one email of a series of Flock emails obtained by the publication. Motherboard said its reporters viewed hundreds of pages of internal police emails from nearly 20 police departments around the country obtained using public records requests.
 
Moreover, more than 500 police departments in more than 1,000 cities have access to Flock cameras, which are not only detecting license-plate information but also people, cars, animals and bicycles, according to info obtained by Motherboard.
 
The company also boasted that it’s “collecting evidence” that helps police solve four to five crimes per hour, with administrators of neighborhood camera networks able to share video data not only with law enforcement, but also the home owner association’s board, or the individual members of an entire neighborhood, according to the report.

Read more: https://threatpost.com/camera-roll-out-r...ts/164502/