Mass surveillance — the government’s indiscriminate spying on large numbers of people — often sounds abstract. Most people will never know if the government tracks their license plate, phone records, or internet browsing history. Some even think that if they’ve done nothing wrong, they have nothing to hide.
Then Flock cameras started showing up.
Artificial intelligence-powered camera networks operated by Flock Safety, Axon, and other companies are making the real-world consequences of mass surveillance impossible to ignore. Nearly every week brings a news report about how these systems are being abused to stalk potential romantic partners and exes, help immigration agents terrorize communities, or even spy on a children’s gymnastics room.
Now, a new bill in Congress would help rein in these systems. The Get the Flock Out of Our Communities Act, introduced by Rep. Rashida Tlaib, would prohibit buying, leasing, or operating automated mass surveillance systems, including Flock cameras, with federal money. It would bar state and local governments that use their own money to operate such systems from receiving certain federal grants. In addition, the bill would prohibit federal employees from using data from mass surveillance systems.
Freedom of the Press Foundation (FPF) is proud to endorse this bill, and we encourage you to tell your lawmakers to support it too. Mass surveillance systems threaten privacy and undermine First Amendment rights. They also pose a particular danger to a free press, by making it far easier for the government to track journalists and identify their sources or to harass journalists. Flock cameras have already been used to track protesters and activists. Journalists and their sources have plenty of reason to believe that they could be next — or that it’s already happening in secret.
A long history of spying on journalists
Leak investigations today often focus on the digital trails that connect journalists to their sources. But the government has also used good old-fashioned physical surveillance against journalists and sources.
In one shocking example from 1972, the CIA followed columnist Jack Anderson and his staff, including Brit Hume, for months, hoping to uncover their sources for reporting on various Nixon administration foreign policy decisions. Anderson later wrote that 20 “CIA heavies,” armed with “binoculars, walkie-talkies, secret cameras and other James Bond paraphernalia” followed him around the country and photographed visitors to his office. He caught on after a source tipped him off. The CIA apparently never found his sources.
Decades later, Department of Justice investigators tracked then-Fox News reporter James Rosen while investigating the leak that led to reporting about North Korea’s nuclear program. Investigators used security badge access records to compile Rosen’s “comings and goings” from the State Department, then combined that information with phone call and email records to identify his suspected source, Stephen Jin-Woo Kim. Kim later pleaded guilty to disclosing classified national defense information.
Local police have also been caught surveilling journalists.
In 2021, reporter Cerise Castle published a 15-part series for Knock LA exposing gangs within the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s Department. Public records later showed that the department began surveilling her almost immediately, monitoring her reporting and social media. Castle also reported seeing sheriff’s department patrol vehicles parked outside of her apartment, even though she lived outside of the department’s jurisdiction. Public records showed that one department employee circulated her articles to “the entire unit responsible for tracking license plates.”
AI cameras put surveillance on autopilot
Physical surveillance of journalists, then, is far from some paranoid fantasy. It’s happened by federal investigators and local police alike. And when police can search vast networks of cameras to track journalists’ movements, surveillance that once required considerable resources or access to government records can now happen with just a few keystrokes.
Cameras like those operated by Flock, Axon, and others make it cheap and easy to link reporters to their sources by reconstructing where a reporter and suspected source have been. Even traveling to meet a source using public transportation or on foot can be risky, since these cameras can be used to track specific people, not just license plate numbers and cars.
AI-enabled cameras also make it easier for police to harass reporters by pulling them over, showing up where they’re reporting, or simply making journalists aware that they’re under surveillance.
Consider what that means for reporters in communities like Marion County, Kansas, where local police relied on trumped-up charges to raid the Marion County Record’s newsroom and its publisher’s home in response to reporting. Had a network of AI-powered cameras been available, it’s not hard to imagine officers using it to monitor and intimidate the journalists they were “investigating.”
The same risk applies in Atmore, Alabama; Calumet City, Illinois; Laredo, Texas; or the countless other communities where local authorities have turned petty grudges against reporters into criminal cases. Officials who are already willing to abuse their power aren’t likely to suddenly discover restraint when handed a tool that makes surveillance effortless.
Congress should draw a line
Tlaib’s bill would help protect reporters, sources, and everyone else from the unchecked expansion of automated mass surveillance. We shouldn’t have to trust every sheriff’s office, police department, and federal agency to use these tools responsibly. We should limit their ability to use them in the first place.
By restricting federal support for these systems, discouraging state and local use of them, and prohibiting federal employees from using their data, the Get the Flock Out of Our Communities Act would put meaningful limits on a technology that is far too easy to abuse.
stLouIST