Paradise Cay puts in private license-plate cams
Updated: Aug 14
Editor’s note — This article won first place in the California News Publishers Association’s 2023 California Journalism Awards for technology reporting and third place in the National Newspaper Association’s 2024 Better Newspapers Contest for best investigative and depth reporting.
Paradise Cay homeowners have installed their own private license-plate-reading cameras to monitor the entrance and exit of their neighborhood, saying they want to take proactive measures to combat crime after two burglaries over the summer.
Placed in early November at the Antilles Way and Trinidad Drive intersections with Martinique Avenue — the only road in and out of the 233-home community — the two cameras have since been linked with the Marin Sheriff’s Office, allowing authorities to get instant notifications when a scanned plate matches a “hot list” for stolen vehicles and those believed to be connected to a crime, from retail theft to Amber Alerts for missing children or Silver Alerts for missing at-risk seniors.
The cameras, from Atlanta-based Flock Safety, are also part of an evolving business model to cheaply put the tool in the hands of private citizens, creating a nationwide surveillance network for use by police while allowing those with access to the local database to create their own hot lists and search beyond plate data: Flock’s AI-driven “vehicle fingerprint” technology also determines the make, model, color and other attributes, from roof racks, aftermarket wheels and dents to bumper stickers and Uber tags.
Paradise Cay Homeowners Association board members Trip Ames and Michael DiVita are the two resident system administrators with access to their local database. Ames said the cameras “seem to make sense” for the community, given its single entrance and exit. He said the effort gained traction when his association held a community meeting after the break-ins, with the readers supported by 98% of residents across three homeowners associations. Together they raised some $11,000 in 10 days, enough to fund the camera system for two years.
However, civil-liberties watchdogs already concerned about the potential abuse of data that’s collected, stored and shared by plate-reading systems have additional worries about giving that tool to private citizens with no law-enforcement or cybersecurity training — especially with Flock’s AI technology that’s scanning more than just a plate.
“It always bewilders me that anybody would approve their homeowners association to collect law-enforcement-level intelligence on people in their communities,” said Dave Maass, the investigations director at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a San Francisco-based digital rights nonprofit.
Tracking who enters the community
Though in unincorporated Marin, and under the jurisdiction of the Sheriff’s Office, Paradise Cay can be reached only by first crossing through the town of Tiburon, which already has its own plate-reading cameras to the north on Paradise Drive and to the south along Tiburon Boulevard.
To national media attention, Tiburon in 2010 became one of the first towns in the U.S. to install fixed plate-reading cameras. While Tiburon now uses the Vigilant system from Motorola, the Sheriff’s Office is creating its own Flock-based network of 31 cameras, including four near the Seminary Drive and Tiburon Boulevard exits off Highway 101.
The Paradise Cay cameras don’t close any coverage gaps in Tiburon’s system, but DiVita said it’s a good way to track exactly who is going in and out of the community; data is stored for 30 days before getting deleted under Flock’s policy.
Customers own the data and determine who has access, according to Flock. Under 2016 California law, plate data can’t be shared with federal or out-of-state agencies — though the police-owned systems can receive and reference hot lists from any other agency nationwide that allows it, including other police departments and the FBI’s National Crime Information Database.
For proponents and camera-makers like Flock, that’s the power of the system, which can provide a tool to help police solve crimes and deter it altogether. Flock’s network is in 4,000 communities nationwide and takes more than a billion photos per month.
Ames said in a recent test, the Paradise Cay cameras recorded more than 2,000 images of plates in 24 hours.
Both Ames and DiVita said community concerns about the readers were minimal, with Ames saying most neighbors with privacy concerns were satisfied when they learned only a car’s rear would be photographed and that the cameras would not be aimed at anyone’s home.
Flock also provides a “safe list” for neighborhood clients, which allows community members to register their vehicles on their local system as residents. Plate data is captured and stored for the full 30 days, but those records can be filtered out of searches. Residents can also choose to opt out of their local system entirely, with their plate data deleted immediately upon capture.
A car stolen from a resident who fully opted out won’t be detected by the local system, though it may be captured by other cameras. Cars marked as being part of the neighborhood without the full opt-out are still picked up by law enforcement if they’re on a hot list.
Ames and DiVita estimated some 10-15% of residents have so far registered for the safe list, while no one has requested to opt out altogether.
Surveillance and abuse
But privacy watchdogs have a host of concerns, from the business model to create a mass government-surveillance system to Flock’s push into video, audio and AI amid the potential for abuse by private citizens and law enforcement — concerns that aren’t hypothetical.
For private entities, like homeowners associations, Maass said it could open a can of worms that results in data collected from the plate readers being used in legal matters, such as divorce proceedings or child-custody battles — or for stereotypical homeowners association claims, like tracking whether someone had unauthorized remodeling done.
Other concerns include the opportunity for vigilante use if a community uses the data to confront, or protect, a scofflaw neighbor rather than handing the data to police.
Ames said it was the homeowners association’s intent to comply with all state law requirements and to work with Flock, the Sheriff’s Office and their legal counsel as necessary “for guidance and support.”
Ames said the “half a dozen” times he’s checked logs so far have been to test the system and that he and DiVita are using the system “with common sense.”
“If a resident calls us — calls me, or calls (DiVita) — and says, ‘Would you check this because, you know, I think my wife was sneaking out on me?’ or something … then we as administrators have to say ‘Well, you know, that may not be a good reason to do it,’” Ames said, an acknowledgement that he, and thousands of other administrators for privately owned Flock systems, have that level of access.
Collecting the data is easier for neighborhoods than it is for police. Under state law, when a law-enforcement agency wants to add plate-reading cameras it must notify residents and hold public hearings to accept citizen comment, as the Sheriff’s Office did when it made its purchase-and-installation request to the Board of Supervisors in November. There’s no such requirement when neighborhoods add the cameras, meaning law enforcement can extend their networks, at no cost, without public notice. In fact, emails obtained by Vice News in 2021 showed Flock directly works with police agencies to generate positive media coverage and encourage more private neighborhood cameras.
And while residents of the homeowners associations, such as Paradise Cay, can add themselves to the safe lists to prevent tracking, other immediate neighbors cannot and don’t need to be notified the cameras exist.
Paradise Cay is the fifth Marin community to implement Flock readers, with a sixth in the works, according to the Sheriff’s Office, which has its own history of violating state law.
In June 2022, it settled a lawsuit with three residents, assisted by the American Civil Liberties Union and Maass’ Electronic Frontier Foundation, for sharing license plate and location information with nearly 450 federal and out-of-state agencies, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Customs and Border Protection, a practice banned in California.
Belvedere police voluntarily stopped sharing its data with more than 200 federal and out-of-state agencies in December 2021 following an Ark investigation into local practices, revising its policies in March 2022; Tiburon had been following state law.
Earlier, a 2020 report from the California State Auditor found that despite legally required protections, agencies including Sacramento and Los Angeles were adding and storing personally identifiable and sensitive information into databases that went beyond license-plate captures: names, addresses, birth dates, physical descriptions and criminal charges. These appeared in hot lists and in open text fields.
The audit followed a nationwide investigation by the Associated Press that revealed hundreds of annual cases of police abuse of confidential files to track religious groups, political activists, business associates, romantic interests and journalists.
In secret counter-terror initiatives, the New York Police Department was found to have used its in-car readers to collect the plates of everyone parked in front of mosques, while Birmingham, Alabama, installed more than 200 plate-reading cameras in suburbs with substantial Muslim populations. Last October, a Kansas police officer was arrested for using readers to stalk his estranged wife.
In a March 2022 white paper that focused specifically on Flock, the ACLU noted that vehicle-attributes searches on bumper stickers, for instance, could be politicized to target people exercising their First Amendment speech rights.
Maass has suggested that tracking a journalist could help police expose a source or that systems can be used to surveil protesters, as the Los Angeles Police Department did in 2020 when it requested Ring camera footage of Black Lives Matter protesters from private residents.
Or, of more recent concern, it could be used to track people crossing state lines to seek an abortion. Though out-of-state plate sharing has been illegal since 2016, and a 2022 California law banned agencies from sharing abortion-related information out of state, earlier this year the Electronic Frontier Foundation demanded 71 California law-enforcement agencies — including the San Rafael and Novato police departments — stop their continued practice of illegally sharing data, in this case to states with anti-abortion laws following the U.S. Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.
The ACLU has questioned Flock’s specific push into AI to gather more than plate data, the ability to get a detailed report of any vehicle’s travel history over time with its FlockOS app, and surveillance packages that let law enforcement add video and audio. Motorola, the competitor used by Tiburon and Belvedere, is reportedly shifting to a similar business model, the ACLU says.
“We’ve seen this technology be misused and abused in many ways,” Maass said.
Beyond misuse of license-plate data collected, Maass noted that the readers use algorithms that can make harmful mistakes.
“When a mistake happens with (plate readers), it isn’t just simply a product not meeting expectations,” he said. “It is putting an innocent person in a potentially dangerous situation with law enforcement.”
In 2014, the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that a woman’s rights were violated when San Francisco police stopped and held her at gunpoint, handcuffed, forced her to her knees and detained her for 20 minutes after an erroneous hit on her plates that wasn’t independently verified by officers. The court called it “undisputed” that the systems make false hits.
The ACLU noted Flock has a relatively high level of accuracy because its AI can distinguish between plates from different states, reducing false hits, but that the hot lists still rely on manual entries from humans that can include typos or out-of-date information from the DMV, FBI and custom hot lists managed by partner agencies — as well as reliance on independent human verification from police, as in the San Francisco case.
“If you’re not thinking about everything that could go wrong, you’re really leaving a blind spot there,” Maass said.
Ensuring accountability
While the ACLU acknowledges appropriate uses for the cameras, like tracking stolen cars or Amber Alerts, the organization argues that “government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing.”
It has criticized Flock’s standard data-retention period of 30 days, instead advocating communities fight for shorter retention periods, like 72 hours or even 3 minutes, as New Hampshire has in its state law.
Flock spokesperson Holly Beilin said the company complies with “basically every single recommendation” the ACLU makes, including to permanently delete data following the data-retention period. She said separate state chapters of the ACLU have advocated for different retention periods that are sometimes even longer than Flock’s 30 days, such as 90 days.
Neighborhood or private organizations cannot change the default 30-day period, she said, but law-enforcement cameras can have longer or shorter retention periods depending on legislation or approved policies.
Tiburon and Belvedere both have two-year retention periods for license-plate data from their Motorola cameras, though The Ark discovered a discrepancy in Tiburon’s policy that states it’s one year. Police Chief Michelle Jean confirmed the discrepancy and said she needed to meet with the Town Council for its input and that she would want to hear from Tiburon residents to solicit their opinions.
Both Jean and Belvedere Police Chief Jason Wu said longer retention periods give police departments more time to see if vehicles associated with crimes enter a town, though both said they’d be open to discussing a change to the retention period.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation’s 2021 report “Data Driven 2: California Dragnet” showed Belvedere collects about 2 million scans per year, Tiburon 7.7 million. But just 0.01% of those provided a “hit” for potentially illegal activity — meaning 99.99% of the retained geotagged, time-stamped movements of vehicles were not associated with any crime.
Beilin noted Flock community members can request audit reports for cameras, and every search in the system is indefinitely available. However, the process of requesting an audit report depends on the entity. For homeowners associations, that request would have to be come from the board, Beilin said.
Ames said the Paradise Cay association is still developing its transparency system. While neighbors aren’t notified when either Ames or DiVita log into the system, residents can contact them if an incident occurs and they can provide logs that show license plates within a particular time frame. DiVita stressed the main point of the cameras is to be able to connect license plates with potential crimes.
The ACLU made its position clear.
“We continue to believe that using Flock cameras should be opposed outright,” senior attorney Chad Marlow wrote earlier this year. “But where that battle can’t be won, then any system should at least be confined to the community itself and not made part of a national and international mass-surveillance system.”
While Maass suggested those exploring license-plate-camera systems “save their money,” he also said neighbors living in communities with license-plate readers who don’t want them should advocate for strong protections, such as being able to opt out entirely or advocating for shorter retention periods whenever possible.
Maass also called for greater transparency among operators and encouraged residents to contact outside organizations such as trained security firms or law firms.
“It’s just a matter of really digging into the details … and spending time imagining all the ways it could be abused, and figuring out ways to mitigate those threats,” Maass said.
Reach Tiburon reporter Francisco Martinez at 415-944-4634. Reach Executive Editor Kevin Hessel at 415-435-2652. Support local journalism and SUBSCRIBE NOW for home delivery and access to the digital replica.