New tools deployed and offered to law enforcement agencies by Flock Safety, the largest US aggregator of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data from both government and private cameras, are moving Flock from data mining into profiling and pre-crime predictive policing. This marks the expansion to road travel of the profiling and predictive policing that was developed and has until now been applied primarily to air travel.

Flock’s data warehouse  includes billions of monthly records, each of which links a unique vehicle identifier (license plate number) to a precise date, time, and location. Flock boasts that it is now using artificial intelligence (i.e., more complex algorithms) to identify patterns and “surface” evidence of suspicious activity.

This moves Flock from a surveillance company and provider of investigative tools to a provider of suspicion-generating and predictive tools for “pre-crime” policing. This makes  a quantitative difference in degree of intrusiveness and danger, of course, but there’s also a qualitative difference between an investigation based on a lawful pre-existing basis for suspicion, and dragnet surveillance intended to generate a basis for new suspicion (that can in turn be used as the basis for further surveillance, search, seizure, detention, etc.).

Thanks to Jay Stanley for calling attention to these new Flock tools in articles on the ACLU website and and in his own Free Future newsletter.

Read More →