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Florida Orders Cops to Get the Flock Off Its State Highways
There is one place still free in the increasingly overbearing surveillance state that we find ourselves in: Florida highways. On Monday, the Florida Department of Transportation announced that it was revoking the ability of local law enforcement agencies to place automated license plate readers (ALPRs), including those made by Flock Safety, along state highways.
Word of the policy came in the form of a one-page memo, in which the state DOT's chief operating officer, Will Watts, cited the “recent exponential increase” in deployments of law enforcement cameras and “concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.” Basically, y'all abused it and now you lose it (at least on highways).
The Florida DOT is giving law enforcement agencies across the state 30 days to take down the cameras or have the surveillance tools taken down for them. It also said that it'll "cease issuance of all future requests for LPR systems within its jurisdictional authority. The agency called the decision part of an effort to "preserve Floridians’ sovereignty and quality of life."
ALPR cameras, and Flock in specific, have come under increased scrutiny in recent months as story after story of misuse by police and false positives produced by the technology have resulted in citizens being terrorized by law enforcement.
Florida has been a hotbed of these abuses. There have been at least five documented cases of Florida police officers using Flock's database of license plates and interconnected network of cameras, including a particularly harrowing incident in which an officer who met a woman while working security detail on a TV shoot used Flock cameras to identify her car, track her, and eventually pull her over. Another case saw a Florida woman wrongfully arrested and jailed for 13 days because Flock's system misidentified her vehicle.
Gizmodo reached out to Flock Safety for comment regarding the Florida Department of Transportation decision to effectively ban ALPR systems from being installed on state highways, but did not receive a response at the time of publication.
While a number of cities and communities across the country have canceled contracts with Flock and other ALPR providers, Florida is one of the first to take state-level action against the surveillance tools. Last month, Texas Governor Greg Abbot announced that his administration would block state agencies from purchasing Flock cameras. The state has spent a cumulative $30 million on Flock's systems, according to a report from the Texas Tribune , highlighting just how much of an about-face the policy is.
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