Eyes on cameras

BROOKINGS — In an age where everyone carries a camera in their pocket, perhaps it’s not surprising that over the last five years we’ve all had our pictures taken a lot more often.

Problem is, a lot of people aren’t aware it’s happening — and the ones who know are increasingly worried and angry about the data that’s being collected about them, and inevitably sold to the highest bidder.

“I do not think it is hyperbole to say there is a digital fence going up around Brookings. You can’t get in and out of Brookings without being tracked,” said Craig Jorgenson, a cyber security professional and one of the organizers of a recent organizing meeting about Flock cameras, the distinctive black oval cameras with black solar panels that have popped up around Brookings — and around small towns and big cities across the United States.

Jorgenson was one of the organizers of a community meeting last Friday, where around 40 people — including some city council members and candidates for county sheriff — heard information about the cameras, the data they collect, the impact of that collection and the ever-changing terms of service the private company Flock has issued to the places that have bought their cameras.

The group plans to attend the next Brookings City Council meeting to bring their concerns directly to the city.

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The best answer he can get from the city, Jorgenson said, is that the Brookings Police Department owns and operates seven of the cameras in Brookings. But there are more. Flock is one private company selling the cameras, which are ostensibly used to read and record license plate numbers of passing cars. The generic term is automated license plate readers, or ALPRs.

The anti-ALPR website deflock.org lists 16 cameras in Brookings and their locations.

But this is far from a Brookings-only issue. Cities across the nation have been barring or revisiting use of the cameras, with notable cities such as Austin, Texas; Seattle and Charlottesville, Virginia, ending their use.

According to Deflock, nearly 125,000 of the cameras have been verified nationwide, with 100-plus cities rejecting their use, even as Flock shows incredible growth.

The issues of privacy, data mining and especially the open-ended use and resale of the collected data have largely crossed across current political lines: Much like opposition to the proposed CO2 pipeline in the Upper Midwest, conservatives and liberals alike seem to dislike the cameras.

In Winona, Minnesota, sometime near the end of July, an as-yet-unkown person cut down eight of that city’s Flock cameras as well as two more outside city limits.

While the city is still seeking to prosecute the matter, the Winona City Council decided not to reinstall the cameras, citing community backlash.

Likewise, according to reporting from the Des Moines Register, various Flock cameras have been defaced or destroyed in at least four rural Iowa towns.

Aberdeen recently rejected a proposal before the city council to install cameras sold by Flock’s only major rival, Axon.

Also notably, Marty Jackley, the current South Dakota Attorney General and Republican nominee for U.S. House in November, recently came out in favor of legislation establishing “safeguards” for the collection of data via ALPRs.

Jackley told South Dakota Searchlight he thinks there’s bipartisan support for using the technology to solve serious crimes.

“But if you’re doing that, you need to safeguard our privacy, we take that very seriously in South Dakota,” he said, adding “let’s put in the safeguards, put it in the law so that everybody knows what those safeguards are.”

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In an interview with the Beacon before the Friday meeting, Jorgenson shared his concerns about the cameras — but mostly about the secretive process, both on behalf of Flock with its terms of use and city officials responding to citizen questions.

For instance, he said, he submitted a formal request to view the data recorded on his license plate and was told he was not entitled to see that information.

“More information is better, regardless of what it is. To me, if you had to boil all this down, it’s obfuscation. It is unclear as to who is doing what and who has access to what. And I have many, many issues with the system as a whole. It is an onion with many layers that are not great, but at its core, it’s what’s going on and who’s doing what, and not being able to get any straight answers,” Jorgenson said.

The Brookings Police Department did eventually provide him with a sales contract between themselves and Flock that detailed the BPD leasing 7 cameras in 2023 for around $45,000 for a period of two years. What shocked him was that the sales agreement pointed the terms of use to an internet address owned by Flock — meaning, presumably, Flock could change the terms, and what they did with the data collected — at any time.

“I also, in my information requests, asked, ‘Can I see some metrics?’ What is the total number of tangible arrests or police actions, positive outcomes that Brookings is seeing from having this system in town? I want to see that number compared to how much data is being collected,” Jorgenson said. “What is the sheer volume of vehicles that are being scanned? And they wouldn’t tell me. And this is conjecture, but I think it’s because their metrics are bad. You can’t be scanning the sheer number of vehicles they’re scanning and make a justification that it’s worth it based on the tangible actions they’re getting out of it. I also asked how many false positives they’re getting. They wouldn’t tell me. It was very, very frustrating.”

Frustrations about the cameras have been bubbling up nationwide with more frequency since this spring, which is when another organizer of Friday’s meeting, Dr. Andrew Konechne, sent the mayor, the city council and the city manager a long letter detailing what he saw as a total bait-and-switch by Flock Security.

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In the letter, Konechne details how Flock’s terms of service changed from the local client owning the data to no such protections, beginning in February of this year.

He reiterated those concerns at the meeting.

“I would just like to add, like nobody here is debating that these things can help prevent crime. We know this. This is a difficult discussion of safety versus privacy, and I think we can all acknowledge you have to be balanced, right? You can’t have all privacy or safety or vice versa. There has to be a line, and when these things were brought into our community, we had a very firm line,” Konechne said. “We had specific promises that I will address in more detail about who owns the data, whether they can sell our data, and how long the data is stored, all those things, and every single promise of their core promises, they were broken.”

You can read Konechne’s entire letter at BrookingsBeacon.com.

The meeting, which lasted more than an hour, was full of questions about the cameras and about the best ways to raise concerns about them, particularly to the City Council.

A planned protest will seek to bring further awareness to the issue, and concerned citizens planned to attend the next City Council meeting Aug. 25 at the government center to speak on the issue.

Nationwide, towns and cities have taken action all over the map on the issue, with some cities removing the cameras, voting not to renew contracts or demanding more information from Flock Security — even as the cameras continue to be posted in different cities.

Konechne also brought up a recent Supreme Court decision, Chatrie v. United States, that was handed down at the end of June.

In a landmark, 6-3 digital privacy decision the court, with Justice Elena Kagan writing for the majority, held that law enforcement use of a “geofence warrant” to obtain comprehensive Google location history data from a digital service provider constitutes a “search” protected by the Fourth Amendment.

That decision likely portends declining utility for law enforcement uses of Flock cameras, as placing license plates on a “hotlist” and locating them via Flock data would likely be viewed as the same practice — which, if protected by the Fourth Amendment, would require a warrant issued by a judge.

The general consensus from the meeting was that attendees would like to see some discussion from local leaders, especially since, to the best of anyone’s recollection, there was little to no public debate when the cameras were originally leased in 2023. Council Member Bonny Specker, who was in attendance along with Brianna Doran, said she thought the request came to the council originally as a line item in the Brookings Police Department budget.

Both Jorgenson and Konechne stressed that that might not have been an oversight at the time, given Flock’s claims about the use and storage of data collected. But, both also stressed, the facts have changed considerably since then, and the issue deserves more input and oversight.

On strictly First Amendment grounds, Konechne conceded, Americans have no expectation of privacy in public. But the data collection is almost certainly not stopping there — and there’s no oversight to make sure it does not.

“I belabored all these points. I was sitting where all of you are, thinking about well, technically yes, this and that. And one of the biggest points I hear is, your phone already tracks you. Why are you worried about this? Your phone knows where you’re going.I think the difference there is choice, right? I can choose a flip phone. I can leave my phone at home. I can turn it off. And if the government does want what’s on it, they have to get a warrant. That’s how this country’s supposed to work. With this ALPR system, there is no warrant. It’s surveillance first, suspicion second.”

Linehan is the Beacon’s managing editor and welcomes story tips and comments at BrookingsBeacon@gmail.com

Brookings PD Flock Contract