A woman who was arrested after she said police wrongly blamed her for a fatal car accident, based on a Flock camera, told senators on Wednesday that she spent three days in solitary confinement, had to wear a suicide-watch outfit and reached the depths of despair.
Lindsey Isaacs said her black Dodge Durango was captured by a Flock camera in Florida several miles from the accident site, and authorities focused on her as the suspect even though her vehicle lacked any collision damage and 911 callers had reported a maroon Durango with a different license plate.
Despite those inconsistencies, she was arrested, initially denied bond, and was sent to solitary confinement because of the severity of the charges.
“The cell door was shut and it was not opened for approximately 86 hours,” she told the Senate Judiciary Committee, tearing up as she recounted the start of a 13-day ordeal in jail.
She would eventually be released on bond and prosecutors dropped the case, instead charging someone else with the accident that claimed three lives.
Senators called Ms. Isaacs to lead off a hearing exploring the expansion of license plate reader cameras, of which Flock is the most prominent player, and the growing public backlash.
Sen. Josh Hawley, the Missouri Republican who chaired the hearing, said he’d invited leaders from Flock, Axon, Motorola and Verkada to appear but they declined, earning derision from senators.
“They’re nervous about being on camera,” said Sen. Richard Durbin, Illinois Democrat.
License plate reader cameras are placed on the side of a roadway and photograph passing vehicles. They then use artificial intelligence to catalog details of each vehicle, allowing them to be tracked across space and time.
Backers, including President Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel, say the cameras help catch criminals. Mr. Patel told senators earlier this month that Flock cameras have helped rescue kidnapped children and even helped track down the man who perpetrated the Brown University shooting last year.
License plate readers have been around for decades. They’re used to mail bills from toll roads and to track activity along the southern border.
But Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said they’ve crossed into a new realm in recent years.
He said venture capitalists realized there was money to be made so they invested in the expansion of the camera networks. Meanwhile artificial intelligence has allowed the firms to build a massive collection of data that can be sorted and searched, making the data actionable.
“Welcome to the surveillance-industrial complex,” he said.
He said those seeking to exercise sometimes controversial rights, such as seeking an abortion or purchasing a gun, should worry that they could be tracked as they do that.
Mr. Hawley said the cameras also go beyond license plates, cataloging other details of a vehicle including bumper stickers or dents.
And Flock, in a letter to him ahead of the hearing, said the system can even search for human images in their database.
Mr. Hawley also said Flock admitted it relies on clients to police their own access and what they use it for.
For Ms. Isaacs, that system turned into a nightmare in Florida.
Ms. Isaacs said the thing that got her through her time in jail was a Bible, left with her by a fellow detainee who was taken off to prison.
She slept with it as her pillow and even took it into the shower, fearful that it might otherwise disappear.
“A flawed camera captured my vehicle a few miles from the scene of a terrible crash. That piece of information became part of an investigation that ultimately led to my arrest on three counts of vehicular homicide and 13 days in jail for a crash I had nothing to do with,” she said.
Flock did not respond to a Washington Times inquiry for this story.
The firm’s truthfulness was called into question during the hearing.
When Mr. Hawlery said Flock admitted people could be identified in the images, Sheriff Ross Teeple, from Pinal County in Arizona, said he’d asked about that and Flock had told him it was impossible to identify people.
He said that struck him as disingenuous since he had photos from his county’s program and people were identifiable. He has ditched his Flock cameras.
Mr. Hawley said Flock also told another sheriff in Virginia that it had never been hacked.
Benn Jordan, a cybersecurity engineer, said that was only true by parsing the word “hacked.”
“But in the general definition of accessing unauthorized data, yes, I would say they’ve been hacked,” he said.
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