Nobody Owns These Cameras, Nobody's Responsible, Everybody's Watched

A county in Florida found 14 licence plate reading cameras bolted up around town that nobody in local government had authorised. Eleven of them are still up there, humming away, because the official response wasn’t “take them down and work out who put them there.” It was a bag over the lens and a little note, like someone’s left a shopping trolley in a car park and the council’s waiting to see if the owner comes back for it.

I read that story twice because I assumed I was missing something. I wasn’t. A private company, Flock Safety, sells automated licence plate readers to police departments and, apparently, to whoever else fancies one, and they end up on public infrastructure with nobody quite able to say who signed off on it. Someone in the comments pointed out the obvious fix: Flock knows exactly who bought the camera and who’s been pulling data off it. Ring them up. Ask. But that would mean admitting the network is bigger and messier than anyone wants to own, and it’s much easier to leave a sticky note on it and hope the problem resolves itself.

This landed the same week a federal judge ruled, in a separate case, that a Flock search amounted to “indiscriminate mass surveillance” and was unconstitutional, because a cop pulled days of someone’s movements without a warrant and decided five days in California made her a drug trafficker. Ninety-one pounds of meth later, sure, maybe this particular person was up to something. But the method is the thing. You don’t get to trawl a network of cameras covering half a county, build a profile of somewhere a free citizen has been, and then call it reasonable suspicion after the fact. That’s not policing, that’s fishing with an incredibly long net and calling anything that gets caught the justification for the net.

What gets me isn’t that the technology exists. Cameras on poles reading number plates is not exactly warp drive. What gets me is the diffusion of responsibility built into the whole arrangement. The council didn’t put the cameras up. The police didn’t authorise them. The company just sells the hardware and the software and isn’t, technically, the one doing the surveilling. Everyone gets to shrug. Meanwhile the data sits there, searchable, sellable, subpoenable, and entirely outside anything resembling the checks we’d apply if a government agency tried to build the same system from scratch. Outsource the surveillance state to a vendor and suddenly it’s just a commercial product, not a constitutional question. Convenient.

We’re not immune to this in Australia, even if the brand names are different. Every time there’s a public argument about CCTV coverage, facial recognition trials in shopping centres, or the quiet expansion of number plate recognition on our own roads, the pitch is always the same: it’s just for road safety, it’s just for toll compliance, it’s just for finding missing kids. Each individual use case sounds reasonable. Nobody ever argues for the network as a whole, because nobody has to; it gets built one reasonable-sounding camera at a time, and twenty years later you’ve got infrastructure capable of answering “where has this specific person been for the last month” without a magistrate ever being in the room.

I don’t think most of the people putting these systems in want a surveillance state. I think they want fewer stolen cars and faster toll reconciliation, and the privacy implications arrive as a rounding error nobody budgeted for. That’s almost worse than malice, because there’s no villain to point at, just a slow accumulation of capability that outpaces the laws meant to govern it. The Fourth Amendment, or our own patchwork of privacy law, was written for a world where following someone required a person physically doing the following. It was never built for a world where the following happens automatically, forever, and gets sold as a subscription.

There’s a version of this where the camera company gets regulated properly, access requires a warrant with teeth, and retention periods are short enough that the data can’t become a time machine into anyone’s past. I don’t know if that’s where this ends up. Bernie Sanders has put up a bill to stop the federal government using Flock, which is a start, and a federal judge calling this out as unconstitutional mass surveillance is more of a start than I expected to see this year. But bills get written all the time and that’s not the same as them surviving contact with an industry that has every incentive to keep selling the hardware and none to ask whether it should.

For now the honest answer is nobody’s in charge of the eleven cameras still standing in that Florida county, and that should bother people more than it seems to.