DETROIT – Civil rights advocates in Michigan warn that surveillance technologies meant for crime prevention and safety are increasingly being used to track communities of color and immigrants, raising serious concerns about misuse.
Flock Safety, a company providing license plate reader cameras often used by police, recently announced a partnership with Ring, the popular home security camera company.
What does this mean?
Essentially, law enforcement can send a Community Request for footage to users for active investigations through the Neighbors App.
Recently, CAIR-MI sounded the alarm.
“We have a large concern about the mass surveillance of people in general, but we also have a significant concern about the over surveillance of Muslims, which has been happening since 2001,” said Amy V. Doukoure, lead staff attorney at CAIR-Michigan.
The home security company told Local 4 the integration it announced last October is not live yet, therefore Flock does not have access to Community Requests.
In a written statement, Ring spokesperson Jesse Carr explained how the Amazon-owned company does not have a contract with ICE.
“Ring has no partnership with ICE, does not give ICE videos, feeds, or back-end access, and does not share video with them. ICE cannot initiate requests for videos through Community Requests,” he said. “This feature is designed for local public safety agencies only. No videos are shared with local public safety agencies through Community Requests unless a customer explicitly chooses to do so.”
According to the spokesperson, all Community Requests are submitted by local public safety agencies directly through a verified third-party evidence management tool, such as Axon.
The company reports all Community Requests are visible on the requesting agency’s public profile on Neighbors.
It noted that requesting agencies do not know who they are requesting video from or how many Ring camera owners exist within the request area.
Customers can choose whether or not to respond to a Community Request. They can also ignore requests altogether. Customers have the option to disable seeing Community Requests in their Neighbors feed and to disable notifications about Community Requests.
Only local law enforcement is eligible to create Community Requests, Carr said.
The requesting agency’s name is always listed on each Community Request. All agencies must be verified by both the third-party evidence management tool and Ring to create a Community Request.
As first reported by 404 Media, the independent media group discovered police departments performed searches in Flock’s system on behalf of ICE.
In a statement, Flock Safety told Local 4, “ICE is not a customer of Flock and only our customers can control their data and whom they share their data.”
Flock customers are typically law enforcement agencies but can also include businesses and civic organizations like homeowners’ associations.
Last fall, the University of Washington reported how U.S. Border Patrol accessed automated license plate readers – performing searches based on data from dozens of police departments – often without authorization.
Local 4 repeatedly reached out to ICE with inquiries including does the agency access license plate readers through partner agencies and has it used that data to track people illegally in the U.S.
But one of its key initiatives includes having full cooperation from state and local police, highlighting the importance of being able to identify, arrest and remove people illegally in the U.S., who’ve also committed a crime, in the interest of national security.
The largest Muslim civil rights organization is concerned this access could affect communities of color.
“I think that there’s a lot of fear right now, I think, amongst people. You see a lot of organizations giving know-your-rights trainings, because knowledge really is power,” Doukoure said. “We can’t operate from a position of fear.”