Full transcript
The good news is people are finally on to Flock.
You have towns throughout the entire country,
from Chicago, Illinois
to Sedona in Arizona,
who are actually canceling their flock contracts
because they figured out
they are getting more and in fact,
a whole lot more than they signed up for.
Hi, I’m Chad Marlow,
and I’m a Senior Policy Council at the ACLU,
and today we’re calling out
what I think is a company
that is really impressively
competing to be the worst company in America,
and that is Flock Safety.
So, Flock Safety is a company
that scans the license plates of cars,
digitizes them
and then allows them to be run against government hotlists,
And it also can store that information
so that they can create a record
of every place you've traveled for as long as they keep the data
And this can include really sensitive places
like political meetings you've gone to,
doctors’ offices, religious institutions,
even where you sleep at night.
And in fact,
if you read their contract,
it actually is worldwide licenses
to use your data.
So if your tiny town is using Flock,
you should be asking yourself,
why are we using an ALPR company
that isn't only making this data
available to my town,
it's being made available
to anyone in the entire country
and in fact, in the entire world.
Too often, the place that you live
may be thinking, we need to collect information.
We need to surveil our population
to keep everybody safe.
But what they're not asking is, “safe from whom?”
And really,
with the threats presented by the Trump administration,
every local government
really needs to be thinking.
If we surveil our local population
for our purposes,
aren't we also surveilling them for the Trump
administration's purposes?
And the answer, more often than not, is “yes.”
I often tell people that privacy
is actually a gateway to all the rest of our rights.
Someone who is being surveilled,
someone is being watched with everything they do
is going to feel less comfortable
talking about
or researching controversial positions,
topics, or opinions.
That's the First Amendment.
There are also going to be afraid
about where they go or who they associate with.
Also, the First Amendment.
For those of you familiar with 1984
right here,
the big slogan that came out of that book
is “Big Brother is watching you”.
And what they meant by that,
is when people are being watched.
They are fearful of getting in trouble.
And it's not just for doing bad things,
it's for doing things
that the government doesn't approve of.
That creates
what we call “the chilling effect”,
where people are afraid
to exercise the rest of their rights.
So when you look at the list of the rights
that you have in the Bill of rights
and the rest of the Constitution,
those only matter
if people are not afraid to exercise them,
and surveillance creates fear.
But there is good news.
And thank God,
because I often don't get to give it.
The good news is people are finally on to Flock.
I've been trying to get people
to use the hashtag, #GetTheFlockOutOfHere.
So far it's not working.
But maybe this video will help.
But you have towns throughout the entire country,
from Chicago, Illinois
to Sedona in Arizona,
who are actually canceling their flock contracts
because they figured out
they are getting more and in fact,
a whole lot more than they signed up for.
If you wanna find out more about how
to do it in your local community,
there is a website,
which is communityctrl.com
It has our model bill,
and it has information on how to
start a program in your community.
The one thing I would say
is to reach out to your state's ACLU affiliate
and ask them if there's anything they can do to help,
because they are a tremendous resource
for anything that you may want to do
to fight surveillance on the state or local level.