Knox County, Tennessee, Mayor Glenn Jacobs is calling on Congress to pass legislation regulating the government’s use of Flock Safety Cameras to surveil Americans.
Mayor Jacobs, better known as “Kane” during his years in the WWE as a professional wrestler, issued a statement on X on Monday. “Today, I am urging our Commission to prohibit the use of Flock cameras and similar devices in our County,” he said.
For those of you who don’t know, these cameras, technically called Automated License Plate Readers, are motion activated and take a picture of every car which passes by. While License Plate Readers have been around for a while, because of AI and vastly increased networking and data retention capacities, these Flock cameras have capabilities not even imagined in the past.
Jacobs pointed out that “Older cameras only took a photo of your license plate, which was then retained for a short time.”
However, now the cameras take a photo of your place, but also use AI to catalogue distinguishing features of your vehicle: make, color, model, even bumper stickers,” Jacobs explained. “That data is stored in a searchable database for sometimes up to a month or more, depending on the policies of that particular agency. When these cameras are deployed in large numbers, they create a network that can be used to track your movements.”
Jacobs further pointed out that “there is no federal regulatory framework governing these devices in place, and the Tennessee laws regulating them were written over a decade ago” and that he fears that this might be “inadvertantly creating a warrantless mass surveillance system and undermining the privacy and Liberty of our people.”