1. United States
2. S.C.
3. Letter

Get Flock out of our state and our communities! It is a dangerous surveillance tool and makes women in particular less safe! Here are two examples of officers, who are meant to protect our communities, turning Flock into their weapon against us. - 1. Marci Bakely thought she was losing her mind. For months, the 50-year-old Air Force veteran could not understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was, texting her about a doctor's appointment, a date, a grocery run, sometimes within minutes, though he lived 15 miles away. She installed three cameras around her home to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and waved it down every wall. Three times she drove to a mechanic and asked him to scan her car for trackers. The answer, when it came, was worse than a tracker: her ex was a police chief, and he had searched her license plate, and her teenage daughter's, roughly 600 times through Flock. He was arrested on charges of stalking, harassment, and misusing the system; in April, before he could stand trial, he was found dead at his home, in what officials said was a suicide. 2. In Kansas, a police chief tracked his estranged wife through Flock and used the location data to turn up where she was, once while she was intimate with another man. In Florida, an officer showed his girlfriend footage of herself driving, placed a tracker in her belongings, and reminded her that he carried a gun; when she threatened to call the police, he told her, "The police are already here." These cases are not outliers. A recent Washington Post investigation identified at least 50 law-enforcement officers charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes; Flock's system was involved in 46 of them. In 26 of the cases, investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners, or women they wanted to meet. The surveillance was nearly effortless: no warrant, no case number, just a plate number typed into a search bar and, moments later, a map of where someone had been. That is the particular terror of it: the man doing the stalking is often the institution a woman would call for help. "Where do you go as a victim if you're being abused?" said Adam Dodge, founder of the cyber-safety group EndTAB. "You go to law enforcement, right?" For years, the company that built the network of cameras insisted this was not its concern and yet, Flock had assembled one of the most detailed records of Americans' movements ever created and looks at the women its product helps stalk as a cost worth absorbing. No one should be able to track a woman's every movement without consequence, and ordinary citizens shouldn't have their movements tracked and recorded by a private, unaccountable company.