Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Flock Wants a Closely Surveilled World with No Exit
Flock 想要一个无处可逃的严密监控世界
Garrett Langley, the founder of Flock Safety, frames surveillance as a Faustian bargain. If we want to live in a world where “crime is unsustainable” and “a thing of the past,” in his words, then we must “sacrifice our privacy.” Imagine: no more carjackings or kidnappings, murders or robberies, rapes or vandalism. “Everyone, in my opinion, deserves the right to be safe,” Langley said, during a TED talk last month. “It should not matter the color of your skin, your political affiliation, or your income level.”
Flock Safety 的创始人 Garrett Langley 将监控描述为一种“浮士德式的交易”。用他的话来说，如果我们想生活在一个“犯罪无法持续”且“成为过去式”的世界里，我们就必须“牺牲我们的隐私”。想象一下：不再有劫车、绑架、谋杀、抢劫、强奸或蓄意破坏。Langley 在上个月的 TED 演讲中说：“在我看来，每个人都理应享有安全的权利。无论你的肤色、政治倾向或收入水平如何，这都不应成为例外。”
Langley, who is thirty-nine, tells the story of creating Flock from the vantage point of a humble vigilante. In 2017, as his neighborhood, in Atlanta, became the target of repeated thefts, he called his local police precinct and pleaded with them to do something. The officer he spoke with lamented a lack of options; the best way to catch the perpetrators was to retrieve their license-plate numbers, but this was possible only if bystanders reported suspicious vehicles on their street, or if officers staked out the neighborhood and caught criminals in the act. Without evidence from such eyewitnesses, or any relevant footage or recognition software to identify the suspects, these carjackers were as good as invisible, stalking the night with impunity.
现年 39 岁的 Langley 以一名卑微的“治安维护者”视角讲述了创建 Flock 的故事。2017 年，当他位于亚特兰大的社区成为反复盗窃的目标时，他致电当地警察局，恳求他们采取行动。与他通话的警官感叹手段有限；抓捕罪犯的最佳方式是获取他们的车牌号，但这只有在路人举报街上的可疑车辆，或者警察在社区蹲点并当场抓获罪犯时才有可能实现。在没有此类目击者证据，也没有任何相关监控录像或识别软件来锁定嫌疑人的情况下，这些劫车者几乎如同隐形人一般，在夜色中肆无忌惮地横行。
Langley has characterized this conversation as a light-bulb moment. An already accomplished tech entrepreneur with a degree in engineering, he called up two of his former classmates, Matt Feury and Paige Todd, and began creating makeshift license-plate-reading cameras out of Android phones and solar panels that could be affixed to street poles. They sold their first models to homeowners’ associations and private communities but soon attracted the attention of law-enforcement agencies, who were interested not in shutting the project down but in collaborating. By 2020, Flock cameras were popping up on public roads across the country, in partnership with local police departments.
Langley 将这次谈话形容为“灵光一现”的时刻。作为一名拥有工程学位的成功科技创业者，他召集了两位前同学 Matt Feury 和 Paige Todd，开始利用安卓手机和太阳能电池板制作简易的车牌识别摄像头，并将其安装在街头的电线杆上。他们最初将这些设备卖给业主协会和私人社区，但很快引起了执法部门的注意——后者对关闭该项目不感兴趣，反而希望展开合作。到 2020 年，通过与当地警察局的合作，Flock 摄像头开始出现在全国各地的公共道路上。
Flock was recently reported to have a valuation of more than eight billion dollars, with its biggest investor being the venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz. Around forty per cent of the United States’ law-enforcement agencies now have contracts with the company, and a reported hundred and thirty thousand cameras monitor roads in every state but Alaska. Flock cameras have evolved from their initial prototype, and now read more than just license plates: they record the make, model, and color of passing vehicles, data that are then controlled by whatever entity operates the camera.
据报道，Flock 最近的估值已超过 80 亿美元，其最大投资者是风险投资公司 Andreessen Horowitz。目前，美国约 40% 的执法机构与该公司签有合同，据称有 13 万台摄像头在除阿拉斯加州以外的每个州监控着道路。Flock 摄像头已从最初的原型机进化，现在不仅能读取车牌，还能记录过往车辆的品牌、型号和颜色，这些数据由操作摄像头的实体进行控制。
Police can use this information, without obtaining a warrant or judicial approval, to make arrests or to present as evidence in court. For Langley and his legion of law-enforcement allies, such capabilities are proof of Flock’s limitless potential for catching and prosecuting criminals. Just last year, a mass shooter at Brown University was tracked using data from Flock cameras, a triumph touted by both the Providence police chief and the F.B.I. (The shooter was dead when he was found, but still, they said.)
警方无需获得搜查令或司法批准，即可利用这些信息进行逮捕或作为法庭证据。对于 Langley 和他众多的执法部门盟友来说，这些功能证明了 Flock 在抓捕和起诉罪犯方面具有无限潜力。就在去年，布朗大学的一名大规模枪击案嫌疑人就是通过 Flock 摄像头的数据被追踪到的，普罗维登斯警察局长和联邦调查局（FBI）都将此视为一项成就。（尽管嫌疑人被发现时已经死亡，但他们仍以此为傲。）
The surveillance of it all is conveniently ignored by people in power who laud Flock, and by Langley himself. “I’ve never met anyone who doesn’t want to be safer,” Langley told NBC News, last month. “I’ve travelled the country, and I have not met that person yet.” Langley, it seems, has not been meeting the right people. In recent months, Flock cameras and the larger A.L.P.R. industry have faced mounting backlash, as people around the country, and across the political spectrum, denounce the spread of surveillance infrastructure into public life as undemocratic.
那些赞美 Flock 的当权者以及 Langley 本人，都刻意忽略了这一切背后的监控本质。上个月，Langley 在接受 NBC 新闻采访时说：“我从未见过不想变得更安全的人。我走遍了全国，还没遇到过那样的人。”看来，Langley 并没有接触到正确的人群。近几个月来，Flock 摄像头和整个自动车牌识别（A.L.P.R.）行业面临着越来越大的抵制，全国各地、不同政治光谱的人们纷纷谴责这种监控基础设施向公共生活的渗透，认为这是反民主的行为。
Almost half of Americans oppose A.L.P.R.s, according to the Washington Post, and some of them have taken to damaging, stealing, and defacing Flock cameras at parks, street corners, and traffic stops. When one Georgia sheriff posted a video to Facebook offering a thousand-dollar reward for information about the destruction of a Flock camera in a public park—“it was to keep our kids safe,” he said, from “sex offenders”—commenters ridiculed him, and lauded the assailant as a hero. “Looks like a Constitutional wind blew it over,” one user wrote; “Kudos to the citizen that threw tea in the harbor!” another added.
据《华盛顿邮报》报道，近一半的美国人反对 A.L.P.R. 技术，其中一些人开始在公园、街角和交通路口破坏、偷窃和涂抹 Flock 摄像头。当佐治亚州的一位警长在 Facebook 上发布视频，悬赏 1000 美元征集有关公园内 Flock 摄像头被毁的线索时——他称这是为了“保护我们的孩子”免受“性犯罪者”伤害——评论区的人们嘲笑了他，并称赞破坏者为英雄。一位用户写道：“看起来是一阵宪法之风把它吹倒了”；另一位补充道：“向那位把茶扔进港口的公民致敬！”
The crowdsourced-data app DeFlock has become a leader in the anti-A.L.P.R. movement, providing a nationwide map of Flock cameras, alongside legal and community resources. Langley called the project “terroristic,” a comment he later tried to walk back. But the public tides seem to have turned against Langley’s hollow rhetoric of safety, and his evocation of terrorism rang alarm bells for anyone fluent in post-9/11 propaganda-speak. Telling people that they need to compromise on privacy is a polite way of framing a nonconsensual takeover; calling a community opposition movement “terroristic,” however, gives the game away.
众包数据应用 DeFlock 已成为反 A.L.P.R. 运动的领头羊，它提供了全国范围内的 Flock 摄像头地图，以及法律和社区资源。Langley 将该项目称为“恐怖主义行为”，尽管他后来试图收回这一言论。但公众舆论似乎已经转向，不再买账 Langley 那套空洞的安全说辞，而他将反对者与恐怖主义挂钩的做法，也让任何熟悉“9·11”后宣传话术的人敲响了警钟。告诉人们他们需要牺牲隐私，这只是将非自愿的接管包装得体面一些；然而，将社区反对运动称为“恐怖主义”，却彻底暴露了他的真实意图。