Ithaca canceled Flock, so why are the cameras still up?
The mass surveillance keeps running, and we're going to do something about it.
On March 4, the Ithaca Common Council voted to end the city’s relationship with Flock Safety.
The resolution included a resolved clause that reads:
RESOLVED, that upon termination of the Contract, the City hereby establishes that all Flock Safety equipment, including Flock Safety License Plate Readers and Flock Safety Gunshot and Audio Detection devices, shall be turned off and disconnected by Flock Safety within fourteen days of the enactment of this resolution.
This post is being published on May 28, almost three months later. The cameras and microphones are still operational.
When Council voted to end the relationship with Flock, they did so unanimously. All eleven of our elected officials agreed to this commitment.
Almost three months have passed with no official update. From trusted sources, organizers heard that the contract ended on May 23, but no timeline for removal was given.
So, as a movement, we reminded elected officials of their commitment, and asked for an explanation for the unexplained delays. FlockOff! Ithaca, in partnership with Ithaca’s Immigrant Solidarity Group, Ithaca Catholic Workers, and Tompkins County Showing Up for Racial Justice (TC SURJ) signed on to a letter, with over 70 individual signatories.
We sent the letter to Ithaca’s Common Council on May 18.
And then over a week passed, with no official response.
The message has been received: following through on promises and communicating with the public in a timely manner are not priorities for our local government.
We will be taking action to protect our community from the harms of the still-active mass surveillance—details of the action are at the end of this piece.
Flock Enables Harm & Criminality
Meanwhile, Flock’s toxic and dystopian technology remains in our streets despite the contract being terminated, collecting all of our movement data. Flock’s Raven microphones listen in on our streets, as well.
It has been well-documented that Flock leaves its mass surveillance equipment up and running after municipalities have chosen to end contacts with the company, to non-consensually collect data. The mayor of the City of Verona, Wisconsin, said that local police had made several requests to Flock to remove the cameras after contract termination, and the company simply refused to comply. The mayor stated to the Wisconsin Examiner, “It could have been an accident, it could have been an oversight on their part, but I think it was deliberate...they want to keep the cameras up, whether they have permission or not.”
It has been well-documented that Flock sometimes re-installs surveillance equipment, also non-consensually, and against the wishes of democratic bodies. This was the case of of the City of Evanston, Illinois. The City felt it necessary to file a cease-and-desist order against the company it had contracted, once that company revealed its true nature.
Flock is a bad actor. If we lived in a reasonable country with a functional justice system and laws that protected people and applied equally to all, Flock would be out of business. But we live in the United States. Flock non-consensually collecting movement data while being out of contract is a practice that will likely face no accountability and no enforcement.
Flock has no ethical standing to speak of. Flock aims to harvest our data, and craves our movement data more than it desires to be in good standing with cities.
And yet, our elected officials have dropped the ball before their task is finished.
Meanwhile Trump’s FBI has been seeking mass surveillance data from automated license plate reader (ALPR) systems like Flock.
The FBI wants to track the movement of everyone in the county, and Flock has both the equipment and the complete lack of ethics required to make this a reality.
The federal government has expressed the intent to use mass surveillance against its own people, as authoritarians do. Everything that Flock has done shows us that they would be happy to further this authoritarian goal.
And as a reminder, Trump’s FBI now largely works to facilitate the kidnapping people with ICE and other so-called immigration enforcement agencies. As reported by The Intercept, a quarter of FBI staff now spend their taxpayer-funded salaries targeting immigrants.
It has been documented that the primary agency focused on kidnapping immigrants and others, ICE, already utilizes the Flock mass surveillance system in its daily activities, often without being authorized to do so.
It has been documented that so-called immigration enforcement often looks like federal officials lying about legal authority to enable the kidnapping of law-abiding immigrants when they show up for their immigration hearings.
It has been documented that a woman was kidnapped by federal agents under the false pretext of immigration enforcement for co-authoring an op-ed, in clear violation of the First Amendment.
It has been documented that Flock has been utilized to target protestors for their expressed beliefs, in clear violation of the First Amendment.
It has been documented that so-called immigration enforcement mostly involves kidnapping people who have no criminal record.
It has been documented that the agency that performs so-called immigration enforcement regularly kills people.
Crimes against civil liberties and human dignity through the use of Flock by police and “immigration enforcement” vastly outweigh the petty crime Flock is advertised to combat. And if ICE and the FBI find mass surveillance ALPR systems to be useful tool, then it is clear that Flock is a very useful tool for this type of nation state criminal activity that we’ve been seeing in the past two years.
Through its silence and paralysis around its promised removal of Flock equipment, the City of Ithaca and its elected officials are enabling these bad actors.
We will not allow this to continue.
The City of Ithaca made a promise. Then it failed to keep it. Then, it failed to explain itself.
As reasonable people, we can see clearly—based on the paralysis and silence of our local government—that it is up to us to keep our community safe.
Action: 4PM on Saturday May 30th
At 4PM on Saturday, May 30, we will convene in the parking lot opposite the street from Shortstop Deli to do just this. You are invited, and bring your friends, family, and acquaintances. This will take place during Ithaca Fest.
Saturday, May 30
4PM, Opposite Shortstop Deli
(Intersection of Albany and Seneca)
At this location, there is a camera that sits on a utility pole on Albany street, pointed toward the Northside neighborhood. It tracks and logs those who go down Albany toward that neighborhood, and it likely logs all vehicles driving down Seneca, as well. And it does all of this non-consensually.
In accordance with the City of Ithaca’s overdue promise to remove Flock equipment, we will be protecting our community from the well-documented harms of Flock mass surveillance by covering the camera.
We will cover the Flock camera there, so it can no longer violate our civil liberties and privacy, so that it cannot maintain a database that can be utilized by a federal government more committed to protecting pedophiles than those who need healthcare, education, housing, or food.
We will cover the Flock camera in order to help our feeble local government remembers its promises, and follow through on them.
On Saturday, May 30, Flock Off! will take action so that this camera will no longer serve as a component in the national infrastructure of oppression.
One way or another, the cameras and microphones will be removed from our streets.