Who watches the watchers? City to consider first-ever rules on surveillance technology

Waltham’s Law Department will present a draft ordinance regulating the use of surveillance technologies to City Council’s Ordinances and Rules Committee this Monday, March 2.

This legislation was prompted by a contract between the Waltham Police Department and national surveillance technology company Flock Safety. The WPD entered into a two-year contract with Flock in June 2025 to deploy 16 traffic cameras around Waltham. The department purchased the cameras using funding it had seized through court proceedings — money it can use without City Council approval — and the purchase was not announced publicly.

City Council started looking into the contract in October after concerned constituents reached out to their ward councilors about the traffic cameras. Ward 9 Councilor Robert G. Logan in December requested the Law Department draft an ordinance to broadly regulate the use of surveillance technology in the city.

Logan specified that such legislation should require city departments to get approval from City Council to use any new surveillance technology; that departments should be required to create guidelines on use of and access to information they obtain from the technology and publish annual reports on its use; and that the city ban the use of facial recognition tools for surveillance.

The committee originally requested a draft of this ordinance for Jan. 20. The committee later extended the deadline to its meeting this week on March 2. 

Public criticism and security concerns in other communities

Flock Safety is one of multiple license plate reader companies that have been entering the law enforcement technology scene in recent years.

Flock partners with law enforcement organizations and private landowners to install traffic cameras that can capture passing cars’ license plates, offering agencies access to a nationwide network of data shared by its clients to help track vehicles and investigate crimes. It also provides AI-powered recording and analysis technologies that listen for gunshot sounds and allow users to search for individual vehicles and people. 

The company has experienced “explosive” growth over the last few years, according to a September profile in Forbes. At the same time, it has also received negative press, especially in the past year, for cases where local cameras were accessed by federal agencies such as Immigration and Customs Enforcement, misused by individual officers and, in one case spotlighted by the Electronic Frontier Foundation, used to track a woman after she had an abortion.

Massachusetts protects residents’ data through legislation such as the Shield Law, which prevents sharing sensitive data concerning abortion and reproductive rights. However, Flock has violated local laws protecting resident data when the company allowed U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to its cameras in Illinois, as the Illinois Secretary of State found in August.

At the time, Flock said it would remove access to Illinois data for any agencies found to be violating the state’s privacy laws, and committed to implementing tools to make it easier to audit searches in its database.

The American Civil Liberties Union of Massachusetts has raised concerns that many of Flock’s local contracts allow the company to share data with other departments elsewhere in the country, even when a local department has opted out of sharing data collected by its cameras.

At least 30 cities have cancelled their contracts with Flock since the start of 2025, many citing privacy issues. Cambridge paused its use of Flock cameras in October over concerns about data sharing, and in January Watertown decided to cancel an upcoming contract with Flock after community pushback.

The company has also been cited for potential data vulnerabilities by security researchers. In December, 404 Media reported that unencrypted footage from some of the company’s newer cameras could be accessed over the internet. 

The company told 404 Media that this leak was due to “a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices,” which it has since fixed.

Flock’s reception in Waltham

Flock cameras have been controversial in Waltham since they first came up for discussion by City Council in October. City councilors have discussed the cameras both as a tool for law enforcement and as a technology that could pose privacy risks to residents.

Multiple councilors have stated that they’ve received significant public feedback on the topic. “It’s a bit unusual to get three to five emails a week about one subject and to have so many residents following this so closely,” said Councilor-at-Large Colleen Bradley-MacArthur in December.

At a November meeting, Logan brought a 90-page list of law enforcement departments across the country that had requested WPD Flock data since the cameras were installed. Since then, the WPD has adopted its own surveillance technology policy and restricted its sharing of data to other Massachusetts municipalities similarly bound by the state’s data privacy laws. 

The WPD declined to offer any additional comment for this story, and no city councilors responded to questions about whether they’re still receiving constituent comments about Flock cameras in time for publication. 

The cameras have appeared in 40 posts on the Waltham community on the social media site Reddit over the past five months. A few responses have expressed some support for their use in law enforcement, but the vast majority of comments have expressed frustration over their deployment in the city.

“Cambridge got rid of them, Watertown got rid of them. Why is Waltham doubling down?” asked a commenter with the username Microkebab on a February post about reported security vulnerabilities in Flock camera feeds.