Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage
德克萨斯州某城市索要200万美元以公开Flock使用记录
As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows, some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them.
随着两党对Flock（监控摄像头公司）的抵制情绪日益高涨，一些城市开始要求反监控倡导者和媒体机构支付令人咋舌的费用——甚至高达数万乃至数百万美元——以获取有关警察部门如何使用、甚至可能滥用这些追踪每一辆经过车辆的AI摄像头系统的信息。
On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data. To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.
周一，《德克萨斯论坛报》报道称，沃斯堡郊区北里奇兰希尔斯的市政官员要求一个团体支付230万美元，才肯履行其关于Flock数据的公共记录请求。为了得出这一高额费用，官员们声称，搜索“约一TB关于Flock系统错误、滥用和有效性的通信记录”将需要约14年的工时，按每小时15美元计算。
Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches. Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records. Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000. Other groups, including a Houston news station called KPRC, have seen officials quote up to $121,000 for Flock records, the Tribune reported.
代表其团体“德克萨斯隐私联盟”使用化名提交请求的菲尔·米诺纳（Phil Mynona）告诉《论坛报》，这笔费用看起来“荒谬可笑”，旨在阻挠他的公共记录搜索。米诺纳已向美国各地200多个执法机构寻求类似记录，他表示，根本无法预测各城市如何评估Flock记录的费用。有些城市免费提供了超过40万页的文件，而另一些城市则收费5000美元。《论坛报》报道称，包括休斯顿新闻台KPRC在内的其他团体，也曾收到官员高达12.1万美元的Flock记录报价。
The high price tags may be hiding data that anti-surveillance groups note have triggered audits, arrests, and changes in how law enforcement uses cameras, including decisions to get rid of cameras. Many cops have been found using the cameras to stalk strangers and people in their personal lives, and so far, Flock has yet to introduce meaningful reforms to confront its stalker cop problem.
这些高昂的费用可能掩盖了某些数据，而反监控团体指出，这些数据曾引发审计、逮捕以及执法部门使用摄像头方式的改变，包括决定拆除摄像头。许多警察被发现利用这些摄像头跟踪陌生人或其私人生活中的相关人员，而到目前为止，Flock尚未采取有意义的改革来应对其“跟踪狂警察”问题。
Texas is a perfect example of how increasing transparency about police use of Flock cameras works to protect the public from invasive searches that serve no lawful purpose. Last week, an ex-Texas cop, Zachary Anthony Klein, reportedly pled guilty to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information, which he agreed to do in exchange for the state not pursuing charges related to stalking several people. Klein’s Flock abuse—along with another cop’s—was outed after USA Today submitted a public records request that sparked a probe, then his arrest. Disturbed by the case, Texas Governor Greg Abbott quickly halted Flock funding and stopped issuing permits, the Tribune noted.
德克萨斯州是一个完美的例子，说明了提高警察使用Flock摄像头透明度如何保护公众免受无合法目的的侵入性搜索。据报道，上周，德克萨斯州一名前警察扎卡里·安东尼·克莱因（Zachary Anthony Klein）对100项滥用官方信息的重罪指控表示认罪，他同意认罪以换取州政府不对其跟踪多人的相关指控进行追究。在《今日美国》提交公共记录请求引发调查并导致其被捕后，克莱因（以及另一名警察）对Flock的滥用行为才被曝光。《论坛报》指出，德克萨斯州州长格雷格·阿博特（Greg Abbott）对该案件感到不安，迅速停止了对Flock的资助并停止发放许可证。
Additionally concerning are officials who deny requests outright. Consider that the Tribune reported that the state Department of Public Safety has sought help from “the Attorney General’s Office to allow it to withhold the entirety” of Flock data that the Texas Tribune has requested. And that denial came after DPS had already responded to an identical request seeking data from prior weeks, the Tribune noted.
同样令人担忧的是那些直接拒绝请求的官员。《论坛报》报道称，州公共安全部（DPS）已寻求“总检察长办公室”的帮助，以允许其“扣留”《德克萨斯论坛报》所请求的全部Flock数据。该报指出，这种拒绝发生在该部门此前已经回应过一个寻求前几周数据的相同请求之后。
Flock misuse recently ruled unconstitutional
Flock滥用行为近期被裁定违宪
Flock maintains that its automated license plate readers (ALPR) are designed for public safety, while courts have largely agreed that cops can reasonably access Flock databases without infringing Fourth Amendment rights. But ongoingly, there are cases dominating the headlines that show a widening web of privacy risks, including not just illegal surveillance by police but also hackers or bad actors improperly accessing data that can be used to track people’s daily movements.
Flock坚称其自动车牌识别系统（ALPR）旨在保障公共安全，而法院在很大程度上也同意警察可以在不侵犯第四修正案权利的情况下合理访问Flock数据库。但不断有案件占据头条，显示出隐私风险的网正在扩大，这不仅包括警察的非法监控，还包括黑客或不法分子不正当地获取可用于追踪人们日常行踪的数据。
Courts may start to rethink their stance on Flock, with one federal judge in Oklahoma last week ruling that a cop conducted an unconstitutional search when searching a Flock database simply because a woman’s license plate was from California,” 404 Media reported. That judge, Sara Hill, argued that Flock’s network “is a type of indiscriminate mass surveillance,” with its ALPR technology creating a “large-scale, dragnet-type surveillance system” that should require a warrant to search.
据404 Media报道，法院可能开始重新思考对Flock的立场。上周，俄克拉荷马州的一名联邦法官裁定，一名警察仅仅因为一名女性的车牌来自加利福尼亚州就搜索Flock数据库，属于违宪搜索。法官萨拉·希尔（Sara Hill）认为，Flock的网络“是一种不加区分的大规模监控”，其ALPR技术创造了一个“大规模、搜捕式的监控系统”，搜索时应当需要搜查令。
A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media that the company had nothing to do with the case but expects Hill’s ruling to be an outlier that will likely be appealed and overturned. Importantly, Hill’s decision does not set any precedent, but it could be influential as one of the first to recognize that Flock searches can be unconstitutional.
Flock发言人告诉404 Media，该公司与此案无关，但预计希尔的裁决是一个特例，很可能会被上诉并推翻。重要的是，希尔的裁决并未确立任何先例，但作为首批承认Flock搜索可能违宪的裁决之一，它可能会产生影响。
404 Media said they reviewed audits showing “there are currently more than a hundred thousand warrantless searches of the Flock system every month.” Sometimes innocent people are arrested, including one man jailed for a month based on a Flock alert that he argued should have itself provided the evidence cops needed to see that he was innocent and five miles away from the crime scene.
404 Media表示，他们查阅的审计报告显示，“目前每月对Flock系统进行的无证搜索超过十万次。”有时无辜者会被逮捕，包括一名男子因Flock警报被监禁了一个月，而他辩称，该警报本身就应能提供警察所需的证据，证明他是无辜的，且当时距离犯罪现场有五英里远。
For members of the public increasingly scrutinizing Flock cameras over unconstitutional searches and other privacy concerns, it’s hard to know basic things, like where the cameras are posted, who’s looking at the footage, how often the data is accessed, and how long the data is stored. Public records requests can help answer these questions, and sometimes police choose to voluntarily share it, using optional “transparency portals” that Flock builds. Those portals log statistics like total number of cameras, vehicles scanned, or police searches in a given area.
对于因违宪搜索和其他隐私问题而日益审视Flock摄像头的公众来说，很难了解基本情况，例如摄像头安装在哪里、谁在查看录像、数据被访问的频率以及数据存储的时间。公共记录请求有助于回答这些问题，有时警察会选择通过Flock构建的可选“透明度门户”自愿分享这些信息。这些门户网站记录了特定区域内摄像头总数、扫描车辆数或警察搜索次数等统计数据。
Flock spokesperson Andrew Smith told the Texas Tribune that the portals “give agencies a public-facing way to publish information about their [ALPR] programs, including policies, usage, and access rules to help communities better understand how the technology is being used.” However, very few agencies seem to be opting in to the sharing. In Texas, there are hundreds of agencies using Flock cameras, and only 59 agencies use transparency portals, the Tribune reported. Of those, just 16 share data with the public. Without courts requiring warrants or state and local officials requiring more transparency, Flock cameras will continue tracking movements in ways that t…
Flock发言人安德鲁·史密斯（Andrew Smith）告诉《德克萨斯论坛报》，这些门户网站“为机构提供了一种面向公众的方式来发布有关其[ALPR]项目的信息，包括政策、使用情况和访问规则，以帮助社区更好地了解该技术是如何被使用的。”然而，似乎很少有机构选择参与这种共享。据《论坛报》报道，在德克萨斯州，有数百个机构在使用Flock摄像头，但只有59个机构使用了透明度门户。其中，只有16个机构与公众共享数据。如果法院不要求搜查令，或者州和地方官员不要求更高的透明度，Flock摄像头将继续以某种方式追踪人们的行踪……