B sent me a video on this and an article crossed my feed at about the same time. I think I’ve posted about it before as well, but the folks in Norfolk, VA are taking action regarding a violation of the 4th Amendment. State, county, and local municipalities are buying into a thing called Flock.
Basically it’s license plate readers that feed into a central repository and the data is held for 30 days. So it’s warrantless surveillance. Knowing where people are going and when is a very rich dataset. It is touted as helping to find car thieves, etc. or other excuse to make it palatable to the public.
Here’s the thing. There is NO control on access to the system. Nor is it localized–someone with access in Norfolk can access cameras across the country that are on the Flock system. As far as I can tell (and I called our local sheriff’s office about it), there’s no monitoring of access either.
The Institute for Justice noted some abuses that include tracking exes and their new boyfriends. Also, security is pretty skimpy so all of that private information is pretty much there for the hacking.
Skynet is smiling….
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