East Hampton Village was one step ahead of the town this week, having scheduled a hearing on April 22. If approved as expected, the law would block village employees from helping ICE conduct raids and investigations. In addition, it would ostensibly prevent federal agents from using village-owned facilities to detain people without a warrant in civil matters. But there is an important caveat regarding privacy and the way locally collected data could be abused.
In its proposal, the village would formalize its position that the Flock surveillance cameras installed within village limits could not be used for civil immigration enforcement. However, there are plenty of ways for ICE to circumvent this type of restriction. For one, because the Trump administration has framed most immigration violations as criminal, as opposed to civil, the village’s position could be essentially meaningless. As extensive reporting has shown, local police jurisdictions can and have performed nationwide Flock data searches on behalf of federal immigration agents, in some cases with the full awareness of local officials.
As 404 Media has reported, Flock’s automated cameras are connected to local, state, and/or national networks of cameras. When police officers run searches seeking the locations of a specific license plate or other identifying details, they are usually not just looking for hits within their own jurisdiction, but are often searching all Flock cameras in that state or in the country. The potential for ICE exploiting this vulnerability has already been demonstrated. And last year, a Texas sheriff’s office tapped Flock to trace a woman who had traveled out of state for an abortion.
Far better would be for the East Hampton Village Board to end its contract with Flock. This step in the right direction would follow those of other communities that have realized that the grievous privacy violations that the cameras represent far outweigh their supposed public safety virtues. An uproar followed the airing of a Super Bowl ad for Ring security cameras, as millions of Americans realized that their web-enabled doorbells were actually part of a vast, dystopian spying system. An important question for Village Mayor Jerry Larsen, who hopes to win a June 23 Democratic primary to run for supervisor, is if he supports expanding the highly intrusive Flock network townwide. Now would be a good time to ask it.