What Flock’s defenders are missing
What Flock’s defenders are missing
Flock 的支持者们忽略了什么
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Flock, the police-tech giant known for its network of some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced some changes to its platform last Thursday. The updates are meant to prevent officers from using the platform for illegal or illegitimate purposes. That includes stalking. 警务科技巨头 Flock 以其在美国各地部署的约 12 万个自动车牌识别器网络而闻名，该公司上周四宣布对其平台进行了一些调整。这些更新旨在防止警务人员将该平台用于非法或不正当目的，其中包括跟踪他人。
The Washington Post recently identified 50 cases in which officers misused systems from Flock and its competitors, often to stalk and harass women. One woman in Wisconsin alleged that her officer ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times. Another woman was being stalked by the chief of police, with nobody to report him to. 《华盛顿邮报》最近披露了 50 起警务人员滥用 Flock 及其竞争对手系统进行跟踪和骚扰女性的案件。威斯康星州的一名女性称，她身为警察的前男友曾 179 次搜索她的车辆信息。另一名女性则遭到警察局长的跟踪，且投诉无门。
Flock has responded with practices aimed at ensuring that officers have a proper cause for every search, like using software to flag abnormal searches and requiring searchers to enter a criminal case number. The changes come with big loopholes, though. For example, officers can enter bogus case numbers, just as they’ve lied to get around other Flock safeguards. Flock 对此作出了回应，采取了一些旨在确保警务人员每次搜索都有正当理由的措施，例如使用软件标记异常搜索，并要求搜索者输入刑事案件编号。然而，这些改变存在巨大的漏洞。例如，警务人员可以输入虚假的案件编号，就像他们过去通过撒谎来绕过 Flock 的其他安全防范措施一样。
The policies also don’t address some of the broader concerns from civil liberties and privacy groups that Flock is turning what was sold as a crime-stopping tool into a mass surveillance network. These criticisms have led to a growing backlash that already has some cities canceling contracts and some states trying to pass laws to limit or ban license plate readers entirely. 这些政策也没有解决公民自由和隐私保护组织更广泛的担忧，即 Flock 正在将原本作为打击犯罪工具的产品，转变为一个大规模监控网络。这些批评引发了日益高涨的抵制浪潮，一些城市已经取消了合同，一些州也正试图通过法律来限制甚至全面禁止车牌识别器。
Amid all this, there have recently been several arguments defending Flock: If these cameras help solve crime, what’s the big deal? On a good day they might help catch a kidnapper, and if not, they’re simply snapping pictures of my car that nobody will bother to look at. 在此背景下，最近出现了一些为 Flock 辩护的论点：如果这些摄像头有助于破案，那又有什么大不了的呢？运气好的话，它们能帮着抓住绑架犯；即便抓不到，它们也只是拍下我的车，反正没人会去查看。
Putting aside the unanswered question about the extent to which Flock’s systems actually do solve or prevent crime, this all skips over a more important question: What kind of crime-fighting system has Flock chosen to build? Its network works the way it does because of a series of decisions about what information to collect, who can search it, how long to keep it, and how widely to share it. Those decisions set the terms of the bargain between security and civil liberties. Believing that technology should play a role in solving crime should not mean blindly accepting the terms of that bargain. 撇开 Flock 的系统在多大程度上真正能解决或预防犯罪这一悬而未决的问题不谈，这些辩护忽略了一个更重要的问题：Flock 选择构建的是什么样的打击犯罪系统？其网络之所以以目前的方式运作，是因为公司在收集什么信息、谁可以搜索、保留多久以及分享范围等一系列问题上做出了决策。这些决策设定了安全与公民自由之间博弈的条款。相信技术应在打击犯罪中发挥作用，并不意味着要盲目接受这些条款。
Consider, for example, its new requirement that officers enter a case number before running a search on Flock’s platform. This is meant to ensure that searches have a legitimate purpose. But Flock confirmed to MIT Technology Review that it doesn’t verify those case numbers, so an officer can simply enter a bogus one. One could imagine a system that instead requires case numbers that match the police department’s records—a more intrusive integration, perhaps, but also a far stronger safeguard and one that leaves a more useful audit trail. 以其新要求为例：警务人员在 Flock 平台上进行搜索前必须输入案件编号。这本意是确保搜索具有合法目的。但 Flock 向《麻省理工科技评论》证实，它并不会核实这些案件编号，因此警务人员完全可以输入虚假编号。人们可以设想一个要求案件编号必须与警察局记录相匹配的系统——这或许是一种更具侵入性的整合，但也是一种强得多的保障措施，且能留下更有用的审计追踪。
Or what about finding people who have been kidnapped or have gone missing, the use case that Flock cites more than any other? Efforts to solve these crimes would hugely benefit from Flock’s nationwide network of cameras. But if Americans want officers to tap into that network only for this purpose, we could design it that way: Searches tied to an active Amber Alert, or a similar emergency, could perhaps access larger amounts of data from surrounding cities. That would preserve the network’s value in emergencies without requiring people to accept mass surveillance. 又或者，关于寻找被绑架或失踪人员这一 Flock 最常引用的用例，又该如何处理？破获此类案件确实会极大地受益于 Flock 的全国性摄像头网络。但如果美国民众希望警务人员仅为此目的使用该网络，我们完全可以这样设计：仅在关联到有效的“琥珀警报”（Amber Alert）或类似紧急情况时，搜索才可访问周边城市的大量数据。这样既能在紧急情况下保留网络的价值，又无需让民众接受大规模监控。
Finally, there’s the question of how much data Flock collects and how long it’s kept. Flock mostly operates as a national network: Police in one city or state can search data collected in another, and agencies can retain that data for months or years. Yet Flock itself says 90% of searches happen within a week of an incident. That suggests another possible bargain: Keep and share data only as widely and for as long as it’s actually useful for solving crimes. (The company recently changed its recommended retention time to seven days, but in reality agencies can hold onto data for as long as they like.) 最后，还有一个问题是 Flock 收集了多少数据以及保留多久。Flock 主要作为一个全国性网络运作：一个城市或州的警察可以搜索在另一个地方收集的数据，且机构可以将这些数据保留数月甚至数年。然而，Flock 自己也承认，90% 的搜索发生在事件发生后的一周内。这暗示了另一种可能的博弈：仅在对破案真正有用的范围内和时间内保留并共享数据。（该公司最近将其建议保留时间更改为七天，但实际上各机构可以随心所欲地保留数据。）
In short, Flock could design its surveillance to be much narrower. If it did, some of the company’s critics might not cease. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, half-joked to me that the most acceptable Flock contract by his standards is “one that is never signed” and emphasized that the best way to set limits on surveillance isn’t with new Flock guidelines but with new laws. (Flock CEO Garrett Langley, for his part, said he’ll “probably always have a different view than the ACLU.”) 简而言之，Flock 完全可以将监控范围设计得更窄。即便如此，一些批评者可能也不会停止抨击。美国公民自由联盟（ACLU）的高级政策顾问查德·马洛（Chad Marlow）半开玩笑地对我说，按照他的标准，最能接受的 Flock 合同是“从未签署的那一份”，并强调限制监控的最佳方式不是靠 Flock 的新准则，而是靠新法律。（Flock 首席执行官加勒特·兰利则表示，他“可能永远会与 ACLU 持有不同观点”。）
And narrowing the scope of its technology would threaten the company’s entire pitch to police departments. License plate readers have been around since the 1990s, used for tolls and ticketing. Flock’s business model—and recent $8 billion evaluation—relies on instead leveraging its cameras into a massive network that collects rich amounts of data and offers police departments a modernized way to make sense of not just their own but others’. 缩小其技术范围将威胁到该公司向警察部门推销的核心卖点。车牌识别器自 20 世纪 90 年代以来就已存在，主要用于收费和开罚单。Flock 的商业模式——以及最近 80 亿美元的估值——则依赖于将其摄像头转化为一个庞大的网络，收集海量数据，并为警察部门提供一种现代化的方式，不仅能分析他们自己的数据，还能分析其他部门的数据。
Flock’s hand might soon be forced. Cities have canceled contracts with the company. Some have gone to competitors, while others are taking a beat as residents ponder how they want this tech to be used and write new rules for police to abide by. The result might be that communities drive their own bargains about how technology can be used to solve crime and how much surveillance people should have to accept for it to do so. Flock 可能很快就会被迫做出改变。一些城市已经取消了与该公司的合同。有的转向了竞争对手，有的则在观望，因为居民们正在思考他们希望如何使用这项技术，并为警察制定新的准则。最终的结果可能是，各个社区将自行决定如何利用技术打击犯罪，以及为了实现这一目标，人们应该接受多大程度的监控。