CA Cops Are Using Flock Cameras To Spy On A Small WI Village- thefederalist.com

Elm Grove is a quiet village of about 6,500 in Waukesha County, Wisconsin, 15 minutes from downtown Milwaukee. Like many municipalities, officials in Elm Grove recently caught Flock fever, installing six cameras that constantly surveil the village’s main streets.

Flock Group, Inc. is a tech company that has sold more than 120,000 cameras to governments, schools, hospitals, shopping malls, and neighborhood associations. Marketed as ALPRs — automated license plate readers — they capture far more than plates: passing vehicles, pedestrians, backyards, and sometimes even the inside of vehicles.

Flock uploads the images and videos from its nationwide network of cameras into a massive location-history database. Flock’s AI tools create a “vehicle fingerprint” for each vehicle — every scratch, dent, bumper sticker, trailer, roof rack, or other noticeable feature is logged. Flock can document where you’ve been in the past month, where you are today, and even predict where you’re going in the future and who you’ll travel with. As with most emerging AI tech, the sky’s the limit.

What’s notable about Elm Grove’s six cameras is not that they exist, but that the cameras are searched more than a million times most months. But Elm Grove officers aren’t doing the bulk of that searching. Audit logs obtained through public records requests by the Wisconsin Institute for Law and Liberty show that Elm Grove’s officers only search their own cameras a few dozen times a month for minor local crimes, like traffic infractions.