‘Incredibly intimate details’: U.S. city accused of using 170 cameras for warrantless surveillance of population

A lawsuit has been filed that accuses Norfolk, Virginia, officials of using a network of 170 cameras to impose a warrantless surveillance scheme on residents, and visitors.

The Institute for Justice case charges that the actions violate the Fourth Amendment rights protected by the U.S. Constitution.

The system allows police “to monitor the comings and goings of all drivers in the city,” the legal team said.

Lee Schmidt, a plaintiff, said, “I don’t like the government following my every movement and treating me like a criminal suspect, when they have no reason to believe I’ve done anything wrong.”

And another, Crystal Arrington, charged, “My work requires me to drive around Norfolk very often, and it’s incredibly disturbing to know the city can track my every move during that time.”

The institute explained that in 2023, Norfolk police partnered with a company called Flock Safety, Inc. to install 172 automatic license plate reading cameras across town.

The locations were chosen to provide a “curtain of technology” which would allow police to watch anyone “drive anywhere” without being observed.

“Unlike traditional traffic cameras—which capture an image only when they sense speeding or someone running a red light—Flock’s cameras capture images of every car driving by, which it retains for at least 30 days. Artificial intelligence then uses those images to create a ‘Vehicle Fingerprint’ that enables any Flock subscriber to both track where that vehicle has gone and identify what other vehicles it has been seen nearby,” the institute noted.

“Norfolk has created a dragnet that allows the government to monitor everyone’s day-to-day movements without a warrant or probable cause. This type of mass surveillance is a blatant violation of the Fourth Amendment,” said IJ lawyer Michael Soyfer.

Making the violation worse, the institute noted, is that since Flock “pools its data in a centralized database, police across the entire country can access over 1 billion monthly datapoints. That means not just tracking drivers within a particular jurisdiction, but potentially across the entire nation.”

“Following someone’s every move can tell you some incredibly intimate details about them, such as where they work, who they associate with, whether or not they’re religious, what hobbies they have, and any medical conditions they may have,” said IJ lawyer Robert Frommer. “This type of intrusive, ongoing monitoring of someone’s life is not just creepy, it’s unconstitutional.”

The scheme gives police the ability to spy on people without any judicial oversight, either.

And abuse already has been documented, the IJ said.

‘In Kansas, officials were caught using Flock to stalk their exes, including one police chief who used Flock 228 times over four months to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles. In California, several police departments violated California law by sharing data from their license plate reader database with other departments across the country. And as is the case with other databases, these can be susceptible to hacking, which can reveal private data,” the institute said.

Similar agendas already have been condemned by the U.S. Supreme Court.