Colorado civil rights advocates are sounding the alarm about Flock Safety’s growing surveillance network being used in Durango and at Fort Lewis College.
Residents held a virtual town hall on Wednesday attended by about 70 people that featured Boulder software engineer Will Freeman and Anaya Robinson, public policy director of the American Civil Liberties Union of Colorado.
In 2024, Freeman started DeFlock.me, an online educational resource that tracks and reports where the devices are installed and aims to educate the public about Flock Safety’s surveillance apparatus.
Flock Safety’s signature license plate reader cameras are artificial intelligence-powered and upload footage to a cloud-based AI network searchable by law enforcement agencies countrywide.
Local law enforcement say Flock presents no harm to innocent people, has safeguards in place to prevent misuse, and recent modifications have eliminated network sharing with agencies that work with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
Opponents say the technology is a threat to privacy and civil liberties. It amounts to mass surveillance – indiscriminately photographing every vehicle that passes, cataloging that information and making the data searchable by other agencies. The potential for abuse is too high, they say.
In name, the cameras appear to be tailored to photographing license plates. But Freeman said they photograph anything that passes, logging location and time stamps as their electronic shutters snap. They identify features such as vehicle make, model, color, dents and bumper stickers, which are searchable by users on Flock’s network.
Robinson said Flock technology – and similar technologies produced by other companies – present privacy concerns to the general public, and especially to vulnerable communities such as immigrants and people seeking gender-affirming care who live in states where such care is against the law.
“There’s some real liability implications for both state and local law enforcement in regards to utilizing a system like Flock that has a national sharing network when we have prohibitions on the sharing of certain data,” he said.
Resident Ben Peters discovered DPD had shared Flock data with 60 law enforcement agencies that cooperate with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement after receiving network logs through a records request this fall, which he provided to The Durango Herald.
Colorado law prohibits state and local law enforcement from cooperating with immigration enforcement. Robinson said state law also specifically identifies license plate numbers as personally identifiable data that is “prohibited to be shared for the purposes of immigration enforcement.”
“Law enforcement across the state ... could very well and unintentionally be violating state law,” Robinson said.
Durango Police Chief Brice Current said DPD eliminated data sharing with the departments that cooperate with ICE once the issue was pointed out, and its internal policy forbids immigration-related searches on the Flock network.
He said Flock data is secure, more so than personal data collected by cellphone service providers, Google and other tech giants.
Robinson said that’s not the case.
“Contractually, Flock gives ownership of the data at its point of collection to the law enforcement agency, the private entity that they’re contracting with,” he said. “But there are also provisions in these contracts that say if they anonymize the data, they have sole and unlimited ownership of that data and can do whatever they want with it.”
Freeman said Flock contracts granting ownership of Flock data to the law enforcement agencies leasing the equipment is “just contract language.” In practice, Flock owns the closed source software and infrastructure on which the data is stored and shared.
The technology isn’t invulnerable to hacking or unauthorized access either, he said, referencing YouTuber Ben Jordan, who exposed how easy it is to exploit Flock cameras’ vulnerabilities in a video called “We Hacked Flock Safety Cameras in under 30 Seconds.”
In the video, Jordan explains how “the most significant and troublesome and mind-boggling vulnerability” was discovered in 2024 by Jon Gaines, a cybersecurity professional, by pressing a button on the back of a Flock camera in a specific sequence created a wireless access point through which one can connect to the device, access its data and install software.
Durango City Council members told The Durango Herald they support more community conversations about Flock cameras.
Councilor Kip Koso said he’s most interested in discussing transparency – who is accessing Flock data and if there is potential for any type of independent review. Councilor Jessika Loyer suggested something similar.
Simultaneously, Koso said he doesn’t want discussions to lose sight of the fact that Flock technology has aided responses to Amber alerts, hit-and-run crashes, and criminal activity.
“There’s always some negatives and some positives. Sometimes the council’s decision is really weighing when the positives outweigh the negatives and vice versa,” he said.
When it comes to data collection, he said he is inclined toward looking at Flock camera’s positives for public safety over the negatives of a loss of privacy.
“I’m willing to take a little bit more of a hit on privacy, because I think there’s really true benefits out of (Flock),” he said.
People give up their privacy and data everyday, he said, using Google Docs as an example. People don’t mind – or don’t necessarily think about – relinquishing their private data as much when they’re getting something for free.
Councilor Jessika Loyer said she doesn’t care if cars are being tracked by Flock cameras if it means criminals are being caught.
Data-sharing with ICE tops concerns of residents she’s heard from, she said, and she is focused on ensuring policies are in place to ensure that doesn’t occur.
“These things are all over our world now,” she said of surveillance cameras. “And so, how are we being responsible with it? How can we ensure we’ll be responsible with it? How can we audit ourselves to ensure that it’s not being misused and the wrong people don’t have it, and that we’re being responsible stewards of this technology?”
Robinson said despite concerns that Flock Safety technology could violate the Fourth Amendment – which protects from unreasonable government searches and seizures and ensures certain privacy protections – there is no solid case law demonstrating so. But as the surveillance network grows larger by the day, so does the likelihood of a court finding Flock technology could violate constitutional privacy rights.
Freeman noted a case in Washington in which a man filed a records request for Flock data on his own license plate to see what came up. The agency in possession of the data didn’t want to honor his request, so he filed a lawsuit – and won.
The man argued the Flock data was a public record and a judge agreed, Freeman said. But the court process took so long that the data had already been purged. Flock Safety’s standard contract requires data to be erased after 30 days, although the contract makes several exceptions for active investigations as well as anonymized data collection by Flock Safety itself.
“It set a precedent that you could basically make a public records request, in Washington at least, and get those images,” he said.
Current said last week that the Durango Police Department shares important information captured by Flock cameras with surrounding agencies – La Plata County Sheriff’s Office and law enforcement in Farmington, for example – and if DPD takes its cameras down, Durango becomes attractive to criminals because it’s off the grid compared to surrounding cities.
Another aspect of Flock’s network is that law enforcement agencies aren’t required to provide probable cause or produce a warrant to perform searches on it.
Colorado Sen. Judy Amabile has drafted a bill that would require warrants for many Flock searches performed by law enforcement, 9News reported earlier this month.
Exceptions would include when someone voluntarily consents to being tracked, for reports of vehicle theft and in other emergency circumstances, according to 9News.
Robinson said records requests are a powerful tool in educating the public and elected officials about the risks of Flock Safety cameras and technology. They encouraged residents to share what information they find with City Council members and the community, and to push for regulatory frameworks.
“The one thing that speaks to every government is budgetary impact, and something that causes a huge budgetary impact is losing constitutional violation cases,” he said.
The town hall can be viewed in its entirety on YouTube at bit.ly/44YMwvB
cburney@durangoherald.com
