From private residences to office buildings, stores of all kinds and even some public streets, the ever-present glare of surveillance cameras has become so routine that there isn’t all that much pushback against them.
That is until the arrival of cameras from Flock Safety used by local police along public roads triggered a backlash over privacy and civil liberty concerns, in part because law enforcement such as federal immigration agents have been able to access and share information from the cameras without first getting a warrant.
Dustin Weir has a Ring doorbell camera on his Tewksbury home, but he was surprised to learn his community had installed some 20 cameras from Flock at intersections around town. So he requested police provide an image of his Toyota Highlander that just one camera captured on a day he dropped his child off at school. From that it was easy enough for Weir to see how 20 such cameras arranged like a ring around Tewksbury could essentially document the patterns of his family life as he runs errands and other prosaic ventures.
As an engineer, Weir is not afraid of technology. But the ways in which Flock cameras are used by law enforcement, he said, cross a line.
“We use these devices — Ring cameras, cellphones — as consumers. It does generate data that can help law enforcement, but there are guardrails there,” he said. “If a warrant was required for every Flock camera search, then I would have far less of a problem with that.”
“Is taking pictures of every single car in and out of Tewksbury going too far in the balance of our civil liberties versus our security?”
Weir is involved in a budding grassroots movement to have communities reevaluate their relationships with Flock, and, in some cases, to remove the cameras. Already at least nine of the roughly 106 communities in Massachusetts that contract with Flock have recently cut ties after residents complained, including Cambridge, Framingham, and Salem, and more are debating following suit. Boston had a brief pilot with Flock but did not extend it.
The paradox posed by this emerging opposition is everywhere.
The world is increasingly reliant on smartphones and AI, with cameras as integral fixtures in public discourse. They are used by eyewitnesses to record violent encounters at immigration actions, and some authorities want to use them to catch speeding motorists. But there is an aspect to Flock, and relatedly, to the mega data centers that power the tech ecosystem, that strikes a societal nerve and illustrates the love-hate relationship many people have with technology.
For example, in July, Cohasset police touted how officers recovered two stolen Mercedes-Benz SUVs within hours by using Flock.
In response to the department’s post on Facebook, one commenter wrote: “A nationwide video surveillance network is contrary to the guarantees of the Constitution.”
“True,” another replied. “But also have saved lives and apprehend dangerous felons.”
Indeed, in addition to finding stolen cars, Flock says, its cameras have helped police find more than 10,000 missing people nationwide. And last December, they were instrumental in pinpointing a mass shooter who opened fire on students at Brown University.
At the same time, some uses by law enforcement have been more controversial: Authorities in Texas, which has a near total ban on abortions, allegedly accessed Flock data to investigate a woman suspected of having an abortion, claiming they were working on a missing person’s case; some jurisdictions have shared people’s data with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE.
Another concern privacy advocates raise is the lax oversight over searches in the system. To conduct a search, officers must select a reason for the search and have a case number. But the American Civil Liberties Union says it found officers often just put down a single word: “investigation.” Earlier this year, two officers in Milwaukee used the technology to search for their ex-girlfriends — one reportedly did so more than 120 times.
Flock is currently the largest manufacturer of automatic license plate readers in the country, boasting more than 120,000 cameras in 49 states and some 5,000 law enforcement agencies as subscribers. It also counts homeowners associations among its large block of customers.
Flock charges an annual subscription fee of about $2,500 per camera as well as a small installation fee. The contract stipulates its clients control their own data, and that Flock does not access or sell it. (Flock says it uses less than 1 percent of the vast volume of imagery to train its AI system.) By default, the data is kept for 30 days, but police departments can also keep it longer — forever even — if they download it.
The cameras photograph the back of each passing vehicle, noting its location, license plate, make, color, and model, as well as bumper stickers or racks. Each image is time stamped.
The system alerts police if a vehicle is associated with a crime and is on a “hotlist.” Officers can also search the database for a specific license plate.
Flock insists the data is protected. But a prime selling point of the system is the ease with which different agencies can share their data. Police departments can request access to another agency’s data and reciprocate in kind; once granted, departments can have ongoing access to another’s system.
And, unlike with conventional CCTV footage or cellphone data, agencies do not need a warrant or subpoena to access information from another department.
“Great news, your network is growing!” said an email from Flock to the Tewksbury police chief, a copy of which was obtained by the Globe, notifying him that police in Agawam had requested access to his community’s live, historical, and downloaded data.
Critics say these networks of cameras can be used to build a heat map of anyone’s coming and goings, without police having to show a court they have valid reason to suspect that person of a crime.
“It could track your entire route, day in and day out, and then you expand that to include all the other cameras in the Flock network in your town, in the town over, and in the state over,” said Matthew Guariglia, senior policy analyst at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital-focused civil liberties group.
Flock, he added, “represents a kind of fundamental fear people have about technology right now.”
That fear has kept Flock officials busy: The company said it’s sent representatives to about 1,000 community meetings around the country over the past year.
Flock chief legal officer, Dan Haley, said in an interview the backlash has helped the company improve its efforts to demonstrate to the public how its technology is being used.
“People are holding their public officials and law enforcement accountable,” Haley said. “They’re using our tool to do it. We think that’s a great thing.”
Flock created optional transparency portals, where police departments can publicly share online how many vehicles were logged during a period or who they share data with. Some portals include a log of all searches and their recorded justifications — if departments choose.
Haley said Flock also has a new feature that uses AI to flag patterns that fall outside of an agency’s “typical usage.” The feature reportedly helped identify five police officers in Georgia in July who had searched Flock for “non-law enforcement purposes.”
Still, Haley insisted the number of inappropriate uses of Flock by law enforcement is “infinitesimally small” compared to its overall use. In his view, Flock has championed transparency, and the tools it released are giving activists access to information that its competitors don’t always share.
“It is very frustrating on a human level for us to see activists successfully convince their leaders to take Flock out of a community, and then to see that community replace Flock with another vendor that does have contracts with ICE,” he said.
Some municipalities that have dropped Flock turned to another company in the field: Axon, maybe best known for making the original Taser device.
Indeed, at least one Massachusetts community that is dropping Flock will try to replace it with another vendor of automatic license plate readers. Salem first contracted with Flock in 2021, and has since used the technology in myriad investigations, including the 2024 pipe bomb attack on the Satanic Temple in Salem and multiple shootings.
But after pushback from residents, in mid-July Salem announced it would not renew its Flock contract. Mayor Dominick Pangallo said city officials ultimately concluded Flock’s system does not have sufficient data protections, given the reports of various incidents.
Pangallo added that for the next vendor, Salem will place guardrails on data sharing and ownership.
“There’s a variety of ways that we use this tool to make our community safer for everyone,” he said. “We just didn’t feel that with this particular company we were able to meet that goal.”
The ACLU of Massachusetts sees a legitimate use of Flock cameras by police — so long as certain protections are in place: a thorough audit process and contracts that restrict data sharing. “But in the absence of those guardrails, we have a lot of concerns,” said ACLU policy counsel Gideon Epstein.
On several hot days in June, Kate Merritt-O’Toole stood at an intersection in Framingham, holding a long pole adorned with a red arrow that pointed at a teardrop-shaped Flock camera on a black utility pole.
“Spy cameras. Say no,” the cardboard sign on her pole read.
For months, the 70-year-old retired nurse has led a group of more than 700 people against the cameras. A longtime activist, she is worried about the potential mishandling of data amid a fraught political climate, and how it could be used against Framingham’s sizable immigrant population.
“The more I dug into it and researched this, it’ll keep you up at night,” she said.
Her campaign was successful — the Framingham City Council voted to let the contract expire in June. Afterward, Framingham Police Chief Lester Baker said Flock had been used in 200 cases in four years, including helping find a vehicle involved in a shooting. But, he added, Framingham would evaluate, with public input, whether to resume use of the technology.
“Protecting the safety and well-being of our citizens as well as our officers is our highest priority,” Baker said, “and the value of technology that helps achieve this objective is immeasurable.”
For John F. Carmichael Jr., the success of campaigns against Flock in Framingham and other communities is unfortunate, as he argues the technology improves the police work, including in Amber Alert cases and kidnappings. Removing it, he said, is only “going to help the criminals.”
The former chief of police in Walpole and Newton, Carmichael said he wanted to implement Flock before he retired, but ultimately decided there was not enough local support. He acknowledges people’s discomfort at being recorded, but pointed out there is no expectation of privacy on a public road.
“You have to weigh ... their expectation of privacy and people’s rights to drive freely through our communities,” Carmichael said. “But we also have to understand that again, you know, the police aren’t tracking what you’re doing. They’re receiving data that they’re not accessing unless there’s something happening there.”
Some of the opposition to Flock has its origins in the Trump administration’s controversial campaign to step up deportations of immigrants. While Flock says it does not contract directly with ICE, the immigration agency has been able to access its data through cooperating law enforcement agencies that subscribe to Flock, according to published reports.
Prior to this year, data requesters could type in their own explanations for accessing a community’s network. Some searches of Massachusetts data, according to the ACLU, were labeled as being for “immigration” or “ICE.”
Flock said it has since changed the interface, using a dropdown menu that has limited options to support a search, and does not include the terms “immigration” or “ICE” in states that limits such sharing, including Massachusetts.
Massachusetts restricts local agencies from collaborating with immigration enforcement authorities in many cases. But the cross-sharing nature of the Flock system can provide an end-run around those restrictions.
For example, a police department in Massachusetts could have a data-sharing arrangement with one in another state that doesn’t have such restrictions on cooperating with federal authorities on immigration.
It was the chaotic and violent scenes in Minneapolis of ICE arrests and shootings of two US citizens who were protesting them that led Weir, the 43-year-old father in Tewksbury, to his opposition to Flock. His research brought him to DeFlock, a crowd-sourced website that tracks the locations of automatic license plate readers across the country.
“I then looked at Tewksbury and I was like, ‘My God, there’s 20 cameras in town’,” he said.
Weir and other community members in Tewksbury sent emails and public record requests to the town, demanding a review of the relationship with Flock.
In late June, Weir and a dozen others grilled Flock’s senior director of public affairs during a meeting of the Tewksbury Select Board, pointing to the slew of concerns over privacy, data ownership, and misuse.
The meeting stretched past three hours. At the end, the Select Board elected to hire a cybersecurity consultant to help craft a new agreement to protect its data, while keeping the town’s contract with Flock for now.
“Flock brought in a VP of whatever, who’s very good at his job,” Weir said. “But most people saw right through that.”
Christina Prignano of the Globe staff contributed to this report.
Yogev Toby can be reached at yogev.toby@globe.com.