The U.S. Surveillance Company, Flock Safetty, is testing an AI investigative tool for law enforcement. Based on Wired NewsEven without a name, licence plate or description, the system allows the driver to be screened on the basis of location, time and behaviour patterns, and calls the licence plate scanned records, arrest records and personal information in the commercial database.
Targets can be screened by behaviour patterns
According to the report, the tool was previously known as Nightshift and is now known as OS Investigate. Flock stated that the product was still in the development stage and was currently being tested only among a few law enforcement partners.
There are 69 pre-enactments in the system, of which 41 do not require additional authorization. In addition, article 14 does not even require the entry of a licence plate, name or description of a person, but simply provides a certain location, time window and behavioural characteristics, such as “vehicles that have been to 3 retail stores within 3 days” or “vehicles that have appeared in multiple banks several times within a week”.
In such searches, the system excludes buses and distribution vehicles and returns to the list of eligible persons. This means that an ordinary driver may also be included in the outcome as long as the trajectories conform to the established pattern.
Recognized associated vehicles
Wired states that it extracted the code from a file that is accessible on the Flock Login page. The code shows that the system also identifies a vehicle 'associated object 'by a camera.
This is done by counting which vehicles are frequently present under the same camera within two minutes of the presence of the target vehicle. The system returns up to 20 associated names if a licence plate meets the conditions of occurrence and confidence.
This design raises questions about whether “persons are being traced”. Flock has repeatedly stated to the public that its technology is “unable to identify, identify or trace an individual” or “not to see a person”.
The controversy has spread to Congress.
Mr. Flock said that OS Investigate and the company's license plate identification products belonged to different product lines, with the aim of helping investigators to consolidate their agency's records and that there could still be significant changes in functionality before they were officially launched. The company did not deny the heart of the Wired report.
The controversy surrounding the Flock camera network has recently escalated. Reports mention that, in June and July of this year, there were many incidents of spray paints, screens and vandalism against the Flock camera in the United States. Other judicial studies indicate that in the past, there have been a number of cases where law enforcement officials have been suspected of using licence plate identification systems to track current or former partners.
At the congressional level, United States Congressman Thomas Massie plans to push for a bill that restricts federal funding to agencies that deploy such technologies. With the expansion of AI control tools from license plate recognition to behavioural model analysis, the associated privacy and law enforcement border disputes are expected to continue warming.