And what they found? One camera had generated roughly 1.6 MILLION images of about 50,200 vehicles in just 21 days.
One camera. 1.6 million images, and this isn't simply a license-plate camera taking one picture of your car and moving on.
Researchers found that a typical passing vehicle generated around 28 images, with some producing more than 100. The camera also had software specifically designed to detect people, vehicles, bicycles and license-plate-like objects.
Physically getting hold of ONE camera provided researchers with a remarkable look inside the system. They recovered 27,321 short video clips. They also found software capable of detecting people.
It was constantly processing what passed in front of it. Vehicles. People, bicycles, license plates, bumper stickers and other identifying graphics.
In one bizarre example, the system apparently mistook an American flag patch on a motorcycle saddlebag for a license plate. And the camera's logs showed more than 27,000 “no space left on device” errors while trying to store full-resolution images.
Oh, and buried in the logs? A message that popped up roughly every two minutes: “Who's a good boy?!” Because even the surveillance state has a sense of humor.
But jokes aside, here's the bigger issue: Flock isn't just one camera.
Its system connects cameras into a national network that allows participating agencies to search vehicle movements across jurisdictions. WIRED found that records from one city's cameras were accessible to more than 2,000 agencies, including police departments, colleges, airports and a federal inspector general's office.
That's the part people need to understand. We're not talking about a camera that simply says: “Hey, that car ran a red light.” we have had those for decades. We're talking about technology capable of creating massive searchable records of where vehicles have been, and increasingly, everything else that's happening in the camera's field of view.
And once that information exists? The question becomes: Who can search it? Why are they searching it? How long is it kept? Who else can access it? And what happens when the technology does something nobody was told it could do?
That's not a conspiracy theory. That's a regulatory and governance question. And now, thanks to one dismantled camera, journalists and researchers have gotten a much better look at what these things are actually doing.
Especially since they are putting these cameras at schools, public parks, and near neighborhoods.
deflockmesacounty.org
Call officials, write letters and emails. Deflock Mesa County has a simple writer setup to help you write an email to city and county officials. Keep showing up to town halls and asking about this. Do not back down and just get used to it.
Never judge a technology by the good its makers say it can do, judge it by what it does and what it will do in the wrong hands.
