Crime fighter or mass surveillance? In Colorado, license plate readers are high-tech and widespread

Police across Colorado say they make communities safer, but privacy experts have a different opinion about license plate readers. 

While license plate readers have been around for decades, the cameras now capture, not just license plates, but vast troves of information. That information is fed into a national database, where it can be combined with other surveillance to develop detailed travel patterns of millions of people as they go to a political rally, or an abortion clinic, a house of worship, or a gay bar. The cameras are so prolific that it's difficult to avoid them in many cities.

Boulder software engineer Will Freeman is the first to begin mapping them.

A year ago, he didn't even know what license plate readers looked like, let alone where they were located. Today, he can tell you where to find more than 34,000 of them.   

Freeman created a website that allows anyone to upload a camera location. Deflock.me is a reference to Flock Safety, a company with tens of thousands of cameras across the country, which contracts with police, businesses, colleges, and even HOAs.

"I wanted people to know what's around them and what they do because even calling them a license plate reader, it's not really true," says Freeman. "They do way more than that."

 A Flock video presentation explains how the cameras take still or video images of every vehicle that drives by, use artificial intelligence to document small details like a logo or bumper sticker, and then enter the information in a national database that can be integrated with drone video to catalogue a driver's movements for weeks, months, or years. There are even algorithms to flag suspicious travel patterns. The cameras also record audio and can track not only vehicles but also people. 

According to Flock's patent, the technology can classify individuals by race, gender, height, weight, and even clothing.

Freeman says criminals aren't the only ones who should be worried, "Do you trust everyone who has access to them? Do you even know who all has access to them?"  

Flock says 5,000 police departments nationwide use its cameras, and those agencies control who has access to their data. But the company admits it was giving Border Patrol access until recently.

Freeman found that the Boulder Police Department was sharing with everyone on Flock's national network. An open records request showed outside agencies had conducted nearly 424,000 searches of Boulder's cameras in one month.

It's unclear what they were searching for. Many of them simply said "investigation" if anything. Boulder now says it only shares in-state.  

CBS Colorado filed open records requests with three dozen law enforcement agencies and higher ed institutions in Colorado to find out who they were sharing with. Most of them refused to provide that data, including Castle Rock, Commerce City, Firestone, Fort Collins, Erie, Edgewater, Brighton, Lone Tree, Thornton, Vail, Boulder County, Douglas County, Larimer County, Mesa County, and Weld County. 

The University of Colorado said, "The University of Colorado Police Department does not share any of its Flock data with outside agencies, so we simply do not have any data to share."

Of those that did provide the data, most allow law enforcement nationwide to search their cameras, including Arvada, Aurora, Greeley, Lafayette, Northglenn, Jefferson County, Summit County, and Westminster.

Aurora Police Chief Todd Chamberlain says criminal cases often cross state lines.

"I think getting siloed and just holding information when you have that opportunity to pass that information along to other organizations that might be confronted with the same thing, that's collaboration. And I believe in collaboration," the chief said.

He says Aurora has about 100 cameras that he says they use only to locate stolen vehicles and vehicles wanted in connection with felony warrants, like a murder suspect whom he says officers tracked down using a Flock camera. 

"The Flock system, without question, is a force multiplier for us," said Chamberlain.   

Which is critical, Chamberlain says, when Aurora, like many police departments, is short-staffed, "If we have a chance of identifying someone that's going to cause harm, wouldn't we like to stop that?"

The problem, Freeman says, is that it doesn't just track those causing harm.

"It's really important to make sure that our government is not installing mass surveillance devices because things can get out of hand really quickly. And regardless of who's in power, it's going to be abused," Freeman said.

Freeman says Flock Safety tried, unsuccessfully, to shut down his website. 

Update: Flock Safety did not reply to repeated requests for an interview until after this story aired. In an email to CBS Colorado, a company spokesperson said Flock has cameras that take video images and cameras that take still photographs. Its license plate readers take still photographs but will be able to stream live video with a free, optional software update by the end of this year.

In a company video presentation, Bailey Quintrell, Flock Safety's Chief Strategy Officer, explained how the company's technology, "let's you search vehicles and people with natural language description across the entire Flock network. You can quickly find that pickup truck with a Texas flag tailgate or the person in a red hoodie with a black backpack. What used to take hours of sifting and looking at many pictures can now return results in seconds."
While the video showed what appeared to be still photographs, the Flock spokesperson says only its video cameras (which are often co-located with still cameras) can search both vehicles and people.
According to the company's website, all its license plate reader cameras will be able to stream live video by the end of the year.
Flock also says its audio devices are separate and can be integrated with license plate readers.
The company has a default 30-day retention policy, but Flock says, "agencies own and control their own data". Colorado law allows for digital data to be retained for 3 years.