The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it?
So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country (—southwest Virginia—) and asked 15 law enforcement agencies, using Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide me with the Flock LPR footage of my vehicle. My journey took me over 300 miles through slices of the communities those agencies serve, including the nearly 50 cameras they employ. And this journey may take me to one more place: an April Fool’s Day hearing in a courtroom in Roanoke. There, a judge will be asked to rule on a motion to declare the footage of the public to be beyond the reach of the public….
Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me. That fingerprint could prove helpful in the case where a witness or other camera captured some non-license-plate information about a vehicle, like specific bumper stickers or a roof rack…
It’s a paradigm shift where we go from having an expectation of privacy even in public spaces to its inverse. Not only do we not have a right to privacy in public; we don’t even have a right to see ourselves as the government and police might see us — a set of still moments in place and time from which they, not us, can decide what our story is.