Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company that collects license plate data and other information and makes it searchable by police.
\n\nData captured by those Flock cameras, WIRED has learned via public records requests, is accessible to more than 2,000 police departments, colleges, airports, and government agencies across the United States. These range from Morehouse College to Florida’s Fish and Wildlife Commission and include Medicare fraud investigators in Illinois, a drug task force focused on east-central Missouri, and the inspector general of a federal agency.
\n\nIn return, Alpharetta receives Flock data from more than 1,300 entities, which span from the prosecutor’s office of Whitley County, Indiana, to the Metro Police Authority of Genesee County, Michigan.
\n\nThe Alpharetta Police Department—which, as reported by WIRED, had an officer resign due to Flock misuse on August 5—also exchanges Flock data with several agencies that have been similarly rocked by recent incidents of officers misusing its technology, including Georgia’s Bibb County Sheriff’s Department, the Savannah Police Department, and the Dallas Police Department.
\n\nAlpharetta’s data-sharing network has…
Original source: https://www.wired.com/