From [HERE] A new federal lawsuit filed in Virginia makes taking public transit seem even more enticing. Institute for Justice, a civil liberties organization, is suing the city of Norfolk, Virginia over its use of Flock cameras, automated license plate readers that the organization says are violating citizen’s Fourth Amendment protection against unreasonable search and seizure. 404 Media first reported on the case.

There are currently 172 Flock cameras operational in Norfolk, which use AI to passively check the cars in their vicinity. Images are stored in a database for 30 days before being destroyed but can be downloaded within that timeframe and preserved indefinitely. 

“The City of Norfolk, Virginia, has installed a network of cameras that make it functionally impossible for people to drive anywhere without having their movements tracked, photographed, and stored in an AI-assisted database that enables the warrantless surveillance of their every move. This civil rights lawsuit seeks to end this dragnet surveillance program,” reads the lawsuit. 

Flock cameras have been deployed in more than 5,000 communities around the United States, and have already been used in at least one criminal case wherein prosecutors used evidence from a Flock camera to try a defendant for robbery. 

Some may argue that citizens have no right to privacy when out in the public square. But the Institute for Justice in its lawsuit points to another case in Virginia wherein the judge ordered evidence from a Flock camera be suppressed because of the defendant’s Fourth Amendment rights. “It would not be difficult for mistakes to be made tying law-abiding citizens to crime due to the nature of the Flock system and in the event a law enforcement officer would seek to create a suspect where one did not otherwise exist, it would be a simple task,” said Judge Jamilah LeCruise.

In its lawsuit, the Institute for Justice is representing two Virginia residents as plaintiffs. One of them, Lee Schmidt, expresses concern that the police in Norfolk can use Flock cameras to easily infer his daily routine. “If the Flock Cameras record Lee going straight through the intersection outside his neighborhood, for example, the NPD can infer that he is going to his daughter’s school. If the cameras capture him turning right, the NPD can infer that he is going to the shooting range. If the cameras capture him turning left, the NPD can infer that he is going to the grocery store. The Flock Cameras capture the start of nearly every trip Lee makes in his car, so he effectively cannot leave his neighborhood without the NPD knowing about it.”

Police and criminal investigators have a constant desire for more technology to help them solve crimes, and companies like Flock benefit from the fact that law enforcement is never going to say no to more tools that make their jobs easier. But we have seen countless examples of things going awry with new surveillance technology. Already, the proliferation of facial recognition in policing has resulted in innocent individuals—particularly people of color—being wrongly detained after an AI system erroneously linked them to surveillance footage at the scene of a crime. Judge LeCruise’s concern about law enforcement mistakenly tying law-abiding citizens to a crime is not just a theoretical idea. 

There’s a constant tug-of-war between the public and law enforcement over how much access they should have to our lives. Apple famously fought hard against the Department of Justice and FBI over their demands for a backdoor into the iPhone, and it’s not hard to understand why considering how authoritarian countries have abused holes in iOS to target dissidents and others. 

Investigators were able to solve crimes before the existence of AI and smartphones—their entire job is investigating things, and they should be able to do it without deep access into our personal lives. They can find potential witnesses, request CCTV footage from businesses, swab for fingerprints, or one of the many other things investigators did in the past to solve crimes. Any attempt to increase surveillance capabilities should be viewed with skepticism at the very least because of the power imbalance and real ability to harm innocent people’s lives. Sure, maybe the Flock cameras can help locate stolen rental vehicles faster. But is that worth the trade-offs?