FBI Director Kash Patel defended the use of flock cameras as a crucial tool that helped the agency locate the Brown University shooter and recover victims of child exploitation.
He was responding to a question from Sen. John Cornyn during an FBI oversight hearing in the Senate Judiciary Committee, with the Texas Republican raising concerns about privacy violations with regard to the cameras that can help fight crime by reading license plates.
But Cornyn was also giving voice to broader anxieties about the proliferation of flock cameras that could lead to mass unchecked surveillance on everyday citizens in neighborhoods around the country.
Patel said Tuesday that private companies and towns put up flock cameras to collect information where there is “no reasonable expectation of privacy,” and that the FBI partners with those companies and towns “on a case by case basis and not a rolling access basis.”
In the case of the Brownuniversity shooter who killed two students earlier this year, Patel said the FBI was able to use a flock camera to identify him by his license plate.
“The cameras weren’t great up there in Brown University. We weren’t able to get any facial recognition on the individual,” Patel explained. “But what we were able to get, based on a flock camera, was a license plate. We were able to then trace that license plate to the individual and his scheme and ultimately find that individual who died of a self inflicted gunshot wound in New Hampshire.”
Patel gave as other examples of flock cameras’ benefits the technology’s ability to help “chas[e] down child predators,” adding that the FBI has used them “when people have kidnapped children and crossed state lines.”