Drivers passing the New Hampshire State Prison for Men in Concord may notice a new presence on North State Street.
At least three skinny black poles, equipped with rectangular panels and listening devices at the top, are visible along that stretch of the road.
They are Flock Safety devices, AI-powered surveillance technology recently installed by the Department of Corrections. The company’s cameras are increasingly used by law enforcement across the country but have also come under intense scrutiny, sparking privacy concerns because they automatically capture drivers’ vehicle information.
The devices that line North State Street, however, will not be targeting drivers. They’ll instead be used to detect drones in the airspace above the prison complex, said Jane Graham, a department spokesperson.
“The technology being used by the department is not an automated license plate reader,” Graham said in a statement to the Monitor.
The Department of Corrections acquired the devices as part of a pilot program to evaluate them for use in prison security, at no cost to the state.
The model being used at the prisons in Concord is the Raven, a listening device. Flock Safety has previously marketed the Raven as an audio detection tool aimed at identifying, locating and alerting police officers to gunshots.
While she said their intended use at the prisons was to find drones, Graham did not answer a question about whether the technology could pick up or collect information about other loud sounds, like a car crash.
Flock Safety is best known for its automatic license plate readers, or ALPRs. It has more than 120,000 cameras placed across the country, the company says on its website, though it is not the only one that makes them.
Critics like the online tracker DeFlock have raised privacy concerns over the devices’ capability to indiscriminately capture vehicle information without a warrant. The tracker, crowdsourced from individual reports of Flock camera sightings, did not list any in Concord as of Thursday evening.
New Hampshire state law limits how automated license plate readers can be used by law enforcement. Unless related to a criminal investigation, “records of number plates read by each LPR shall not be recorded or transmitted anywhere and shall be purged from the system within three minutes of their capture in such a manner that they are destroyed and are not recoverable,” the law states.
Law enforcement agencies argue the devices are useful tools. Flock Safety told PBS News that its technology helps solve between 800,000 and one million crimes each year.
Graham said the Department of Corrections is participating in the pilot program because drones are becoming a more common way to bring contraband into prisons. Drones flying overhead can deposit items into the yard or elsewhere within a prison’s boundaries.
New Hampshire has “routinely seen unauthorized drone activity” around the prisons, Graham said, but she did not offer specific examples.
“This is a real and ongoing security concern, particularly because drones can be used to introduce contraband into a facility,” Graham said in a statement. “This pilot will give us an opportunity to evaluate whether this technology can help us better address that concern.”
