https://consumerrights.wiki/w/Flock_license_plate_readers
And more about the company behind the cameras:
https://open.spotify.com/episode/2V5m4J0tjYg1shWXWrOG8k?si=k...
Devices tracked on the internet Car tracked outside the house Wifi 7 to track you in the house
Think of the children, the few deaths. Instead we need better policy enforcement. Expire licenses sooner, stricter driving tests, penalties on big tech, breaking up of monopolies, better social care programs, police that are trained in descalating and have empathy towards the community being policed, law makers listening to people and not lobbyists.
All of the right solutions require work. So we are left with an authoritarian fear driven state
That’s a big misconception, flock is a car identification system not a license plate one. I have seen many videos of some crime documentaries where flock was used to ID cars with no license plates, and weeks later they still have them in the system to track, coupled with phone tracking, they know exactly all the details needed.
In the USA in 2026, "capitalism", "politics", and "evil" have all become synonymous.
Maybe I am naive, and the corruption is too deep and pervasive.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UMIwNiwQewQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vU1-uiUlHTo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
I recommend them.
At least 40,990 [2] innocent people died in the US in 2023, without significant outcry - that is, on the road, in car accidents. People in the US clearly value the freedom of driving over the deaths of innocent people. In 2023, there were an estimated 19,800 [3] homicides in the US. But even if you assume surveillance like Flock could prevent a meaningful fraction of those homicides - and there's little evidence it does [4] - that's still asking people to give up their most sensitive freedom, the right to move without being tracked, for speculative gains. People are not willing to sacrifice their freedom to save 40,990 people from cars, why should our constant locations be monitored?
The abuse isn't speculative. Police have been caught stalking exes, tracking abortions, and innocent people [5] have been held at gunpoint due to a flock misread. The "safety" these cameras provide comes with a surveillance that's already being turned against ordinary people.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690237
[2] https://www.nhtsa.gov/press-releases/2022-traffic-deaths-202...
[3] https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/hvus23.pdf
[4] Flock can't even demonstrably reduce car break-ins. The drop in San Francisco started months before cameras were installed (https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/sf-car-breakins/). If it can't prevent car beak-ins, how can we expect it to make a dent in homicides.
[5] https://www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety-alpr-cameras-mi...
>misreads by Flock's automated license plate readers... resulted in people who hadn't committed crimes being stopped at gunpoint, sent to jail, or mauled by a police dog, among other outcomes.
Most places in America don't have problems that surveillance solves. They have problems they already know about and won't act on. Cameras don't fix homelessness or addiction or underfunded services. They just make life harder for regular people.
But that's the whole appeal for bureaucrats. Buying a product looks like doing something without having to do any of the actual work.
> Flock has recently expanded into other technologies... Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
I have not done any research if that's out of the frying pan and into the fire or an improvement
Also, I can't help but feel like I'm watching a young Dr. Emmett Brown.. Great Scott!!
Soon after the cameras were installed, some thieves stole a gift my brother had sent me. Thanks to license plate data and images of their faces, Vancouver PD had little trouble catching the perpetrators. It turned out that in addition to stealing Amazon/UPS/Fedex packages, they were stealing USPS mail and using it to commit identity theft. IIRC they ended up getting a decade in federal prison.
It seems like only a few people are responsible for the majority of thefts, so catching them and locking them up drastically improves quality of life for everyone else. Obviously this technology could be abused, but that's also true for things like fingerprinting, DNA evidence, and ID requirements. Similarly to those technologies, we could have laws restricting certain uses, allowing us to reduce crime while preventing abuses. But if a private community wants to install cameras and allow law enforcement to access the data they record, I don't see any constitutional issues.
You might be shocked to discover there are subdivisions so affluent they can afford physical armed security and access control structures with far more invasive identification and logging procedures.
There’s more of us techno anarchists out there apparently!
Why don’t these people use Peertube at least. Fact of the matter is they’d like to personally profit off the same nonsense they complain about. This person has a million subscribers, they aren’t some random whistleblower. It’s a job, like all media, generating outrage.
If all of them used peertube maybe we’d have a solid competitor.
When some folks came by checking for unlocked back doors years ago… they skipped my house.
Don’t even need the dog sometimes.
Dog barking at mail delivery person. Delivery person goes away. Dog thinks barking saved the home.
What a great analogy.
I feel like nowadays with all the political FUD about "crime and safety" here in LA, this should be required reading
Benn Jordan's YouTube channel is a registered Nonprofit https://www.patreon.com/posts/nonprofit-has-82858569
It is very clearly because YouTube has a higher reach than any other platform in that space.
Given that we (societally, rather than like, you, I or I imagine most of the people reading this here) seem perfectly willing to sacrifice personal freedoms elsewhere (that flock was ever deployed, the past few years rollout of age gates on websites, etc), how can you conclude that with cars its unwillingness to sacrifice personal freedom rather than entrenched economic interests driving (lol) the lack of change with cars?
Im not advocating for these cameras at all, but I dont think this is a very good line of thinking. The drop started before Flock, but that doesnt mean that they arent beneficial and currently helping lower the rate even further.
"Making life harder for people [in the other tribe]" has become a core platform for a great many politicians. There's growing movement advocating that one of the major purposes of government is to grief people you don't like. Looked at through that lens, blanketing small towns with these things, with a plan to use them against "Those People," makes complete sense.
Increasing the quality of the panopticon has all the downsides we talk about regularly on HN, and if you can't do anything useful for society with the data, it only ends up hurting people.
As someone that lives in SF and has spent a decent amount of time in Seattle... this isn't accurate. I lived for a few years in Philadelphia and would actually hear gunshots frequently. Friends of friends got shot. Many a friend got mugged. Thankfully I never got attacked.
Don't fall for the bait that because we have homelessness we're a hellscape (and the homeless population is nothing like what is in Los Angeles from what I've seen with my own eyes).
I don't think it's the bureaucrats. You should hear the Flock CEO talk. They have made it very public that their direct intent is to influence government policy in sweeping and total fashion to enable their service to be the mass surveillance tool of the near future. They sincerely believe that people will look back on them as the saviours of mankind.
I’m not a fan of Flock but I would welcome anything that knocks out some of the ghetto birds’ budget.
Are there reports or studies released which explains how the flock system influenced these reductions?
It would be easy to create a camera network that is locally owned and operated by public agencies, and if any place in America could so that it should be SF.
I don't know if it's criminal in any EU country, but it would be something that you could complain to DPA about. Or initiate civil lawsuit against the controller.
Worth noting is that in some cases the camera vendor might also be (joint) controller as they can determine means & purposes of the processing. If they are simply storing the video then it's unlikely, but if they for example use it for AI training that would likely bring them controller territory.
The Axon contract is smaller than the Flock one, 50 cameras instead of >100, but that's because it's all they could get budget for, and they want to expand. DPD owns the data and is theoretically not supposed to share it with federal agencies, but there are lots of legal ways to make them comply. They're setting a 21-day retention period for data that's not part of an ongoing investigation, but I think that's missing the point, and it's not codified into law. The Axon cameras can be switched into a mode where DPD can view live feeds. Most of the contract provisions that the mayor's office added because of significant public outcry I would call "token." They're not addressing the real issues, and it's still contributing heavily to the development of the surveillance state.
Overall, it's an improvement, in the sense that breaking your leg is better than breaking both your legs. But don't get me wrong, they're coming for the other one as soon as they can.
Interestingly, a lot of ordinary "gated" communities aren't as exclusive as their misleading signage suggests. For example, there are a number of areas where the sidewalks are indeed public and right-of-ways but display says the area is "private" when it is not as evidenced by county GIS data. Jeff Gray runs into this often in Florida. It's similar to the bogus "no parking" signs and hiding of public right of way access that routinely happens in Malibu.
Government loves the product. What it doesn't like about Flock is that the peasants are aware about it and complaining.
Would we have such a problem with cameras if the videos were stored locally and not in the cloud?
It's not binary.
People are absolutely willing to sacrifice some of their freedoms to save lives. That's why we have speed limits, seat-belt and helmet laws, automobile safety regulations, DWI laws, etc.
It might come as a shock, but there's nothing guaranteeing private movement in public in the US. It is totally legal for people to whip out their phone and start filming you in public. People can set up cameras on their property and film the road outside their house.
In fact, many of the municipalities that have "ditched" still have loads of flock cameras that they cant remove because they're on private property owned by the property owners.
We are all different, and I think where we each land on the security <--> privacy continuum will depend on who we are.
This is also true of constitutional rights. The US constitution was written by a small group of wealthy white men. At the time of its drafting, some people were considered property and had no freedom. Women didn't have the same rights as men and were not allowed to vote. Where the framers landed on the security <--> privacy continuum may have been a very different place than many US residents would land today. Rape, murder, property crimes, etc... even today some groups are much more often victims than others. Safety is a much larger concern for some groups than others.
I just feel like you are painting with a very broad brush when it comes to "people."
in 2025 in NYC 235 people died in auto accidents. in 1900 in NYC, 200 people died in horse related accidents. As the population has quadrupled in that time, the death rate has dropped substantially. Automobiles claim all those saved lives, "innocent" & criminal alike.
If you think FLOCK is an issue, you're barking up the wrong tree. You can remove all the FLOCK camera's you want and it won't change the already overwhelming passive surveillance that's already in place.
We crossed the Rubicon decades ago when people gave up their ability to move without being tracked for speculative gains when they started using smartphones religiously.
Also, the passive surveillance has resulted in several high profile killers like LISK and Bryan Kohberger being caught. So as much bad as you think it does, there are clear cases where its helped crack decades old serial killings and put horrifically violent people in jail. I think we can both agree we don't want those people out walking freely in our society.
1/6 of those were pedestrians. 1/6 of those were motorcyclists. 1/2 of those were people driving drunk. 1/2 of those were single vehicle accidents. Young men with high horsepower cars are a significant factor in many of these.
You shouldn't use the statistic to infer "innocence." The picture of what type of accidents lead to fatalities of often more complicated than people would like to assume.
If you die of a heart attack while driving; then yep, you're in that statistic as well. It's _every_ fatality on the road.
A better statistic might be 222,000 people in 2023 died due to "unintentional accidents." We could save 20% of those people by simply outlawing ladders or being more than 6' off the ground without appropriate safety equipment.
In what way do cameras make life harder for regular people? If anything rampant crime (and progressive legal systems' unwillingness to lock up repeat offenders for a long time or at all) makes life much harder for regular people than a camera just sitting there.
It's gross but I think the cohort of America that watches Fox News all day probably loves these things because they've been brainwashed with crime reports that are disproportionate from reality.
Flock's headquarters and largest offices are in Atlanta. They also have an office in Boston.
Ring's headquarters were in Santa Monica until post-acquisition they moved to Hawthorne, CA.
Arlo's offices are in Carlsbad and San Jose. Ok, finally an office in the Bay Area (one of two main offices), but still not San Francisco.
I live just outside Seattle. I worked for Flock.
Flock is a company based in Atlanta GA.
His only advantage is that the cops are on his side and won’t let go of these cameras without a fight.
In other words: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xSVqLHghLpw
The brutal reality is everyone is doing this and there's nothing you can do about it. National Security trumps all other concerns (even the GDPR exempts governments who argue their data collection is done for National Security reasons), especially in a world as unstable as today.
[0] - https://www.japan.go.jp/kizuna/2024/06/japans_ai-based_crime...
[1] - https://www.tc.u-tokyo.ac.jp/en/ai1ec_event/10769/
i am somewhat convinced that Americans views on cars is like that of guns, a absolute right that can and will not be infringed no matter how many must die
cars are more of a necessary “evil” than guns so the comparison is a little extreme so i don’t think the infringement of movement to cars is entirely irrational or unmetered, esp when in 99% of this country a car is absolutely required to live
https://law.stanford.edu/2018/06/22/supreme-court-defends-pr...
> The Court decided that a person has a “legitimate expectation of privacy in the record of his physical movements.”
and
> "A person does not surrender all Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere."
In my view, the individual right to document anything one may observe in public is significantly different from tax dollars being spent to record everything that's visible in public, analyze it with AI, and then cross-reference it across an extended period to track the movements of law abiding Americans.
It's unreasonable to think you won't appear in someone's camera lens at any given moment while out in public. It's not at all unreasonable to assume your patterns of life won't be tagged and cataloged for weeks on end, for whatever reason, by a private or public entity.
You're right there's not enough precedent here yet, but we shouldn't let the current precedent of there being almost no regulation on this stuff remain.
I feel very comfortable saying that it has less to do with who you are and more to do with how much you've and/or the people around you have been on the business end of any sort of enforcement system or you've seen how the sausage is made.
There's demographic correlations to an extend of course but I feel very comfortable saying that Popeyes employees and fine gun collectors (i.e. two groups that are probably pretty far apart on just about everything) both land a heck of a lot closer to "the framers" than HN, Reddit and the "western white collar internet" generally does.
After the Elon Musk and Taylor Swift outcry rich people can now exempt themselves from being tracked
https://gizmodo.com/congress-just-made-it-way-harder-to-trac...
But Flock tracks them on the ground when they get in their big S Mercedes after arriving at their third vacation home in Aspen.
Flock also tracks the wealthy who can't afford charter a jet, but who can afford to buy seats on the fanciest side of the curtain.
Flock tracks the doing-alright folks in business class.
Flock tracks those aspires to reach these levels: It even tracks the temporarily-disadvantaged billionaires who work soulless factory jobs and stuggle to keep up on the lease for their Black Express RAM 1500 Quad Cab, who rail against taxing the people who actually do have money as if that would ruin their own lives.
Flock tracks Joey who manages the sandwich shop down the way.
Flock tracks everyone.
By the time we get down to the point of mentioning that "everyone" includes the subset of people who are criminals, that part almost seems like a bug instead of a feature.
You can "justify" so much with that sentence, that it becomes meaningless.
Also, it won't hide the fact that this surveillance infrastructure can cause much much more harm then it prevents. We've seen what it might do in repressive states and we see today that even those states which represented the idea of individual freedom on this planet, you are only one election away from madness.
Isn't that true of almost every restraint on the state's power?
A lot of less intelligent people get very emotional about the state quartering soldiers in homes against the wishes of the homeowner. But if you've got nothing to hide, you've got nothing to fear. We may not know who the Zodiac Killer is but I can tell you one thing for sure - he didn't have four to ten infantrymen in his house, keeping track of his comings and goings. Given the obvious security benefits of having soldiers in your home, no rational person would object - unless they've got a meth lab in their basement. /s
Not to say we shouldn't be bringing these numbers down, however that doesn't seem like's OPs goal which sounds like propaganda.
Additionally, the surveillance apparatus enables parallel reconstruction. When law enforcement gathers evidence via illegal means, they can then use the drag net to find cause to detain/search unrelated to the original crime, in order to have cover to gather evidence they illegally gathered prior, aka a loophole for civil rights.
https://academic.oup.com/nc/article/2024/1/niae039/7920510?l...
That would be one of my seconnd pick for talent pool if I wanted to get at people who'd be exited to build 1984. Behind DC, of course.
Both Seattle and SF have lower violent crime rates than Salt Lake City.
N.b. property crime is different and is a much less reliable metric. Both cities are ranked higher for property crime, but still below the famously dangerous Salt Lake City.
Tomorrow a police officer will suggest that these drones (that we are already using successfully) could be very useful for checking up on that "dangerous" neighborhood.
With their drones they now have cameras roaming freely everywhere.
Scan complete. Please do not move or attempt to leave the area until you have been notified via the 'GovernmentForYou' app that you are cleared to leave the area.
Because you have been identified in the active area police have been granted legal probable cause to search your home. Please unlock your homes doors via any smart home app you have to prevent the authorities from forcibly removing your door onsite
Notification. Citizen because of your scan you have been identified as committing a bank fraud case in North Dakota and will be detained and transported (the move process takes 2-4 weeks). Once in North Dakota your right to a speedy trial will start if you are held more than the reasonable 60 day administration period.
Have a good day citizen and thank you for your cooperation."
But sadly lots of people want everyone else subject to it, and some are willing to submit to it themselves to get it. It's not a foregone conclusion.
Flock's stats are very misleading too. If there was a Flock query in the course of investigating a crime, even if it leads nowhere or isn't relevant to the arrest or conviction, still, Flock was queried, so "Flock solved a crime".
It was sad. I had significant ethical questions when I joined, but all through recruitment and week one, everything was all about controls and restraints and auditing and ethics. After that, nope, a free for all. Selling our products in states that don't allow the use of certain functionality? Not our problem. We're not disabling it. That's up to you to decide whether you're using it or not.
Maybe not me personally, but society can.
The world is the most stable and peaceful it's been in decades if not longer. What is your evidence that the world is unstable?
1a) Review will take time / resources which could be spent on human policing, harming the community.
1b) Some jurisdictions may prefer "broken windows as policy", the notion that they can construct a "reasonable suspicion", given enough garbage (some of it outright garbage, the point being there is so much of it nobody cares; don't need to do an accurate drug test until trial, right?).
2) False surveillance hits will make it through human review and result in injury to innocent humans.
3) Police forces already lack the money / manpower to investigate potential crimes.
4) Police forces already "prioritize" other matters than the mentally ill setting their houses on fire or releasing plagues of rabbits into their neighborhoods (actual things that have happened to me!).
A government with aggressive surveillance ambitions but a decaying police department and justice system looks to me very much like the guy with a mountain of guns and ammo but no parallel investment in something like battlefield medicine. Whatever you're telling yourself about the reason for what you're doing, it is manifestly not correct, at least going by other investments I would expect to see and find neglected.
I’m lucky to live in a walker-friendly neighborhood where most homes aren’t walled off by privacy fences. I’ve found our communal strength in talking to neighbors about the cameras that feed and feed off our fear in isolation. It’s a choice.
It's that they don't have the basic strength of building alliances in the first place - something every kid is supposed to learn through the joys and pains of playing together. Bullies are not generally the popular ones, but neither are the loners.
To put it another way: castles can't survive siege forever. They are a delaying tactic until outside help can arrive.
"The Dauphin, whom of succors we entreated, Returns us that his powers are yet not ready To raise so great a siege. Therefore, great king, We yield our town and lives to thy soft mercy." -- Henry V, Act 3, scene 3
Every other civil enforcer can basically fine you on a whim and then your appeal goes into a system that makes jim crow look impartial. So yeah, I'm not worried about the cops. I'm worried about the zoning office "fixing" a budget shortfall by fining people for unpermitted kiddie pools or whatever and in the 10yr it takes to get smacked down in court they'll have stolen the property of a ton of people. I'm dead serious. However bad you think it could be reality is worse. These non-LEO departments make the most sloppy podunk sheriff's office look like the FBI.
This statistically defendable study found crash effects that were consistent in direction with those found in many previous studies, although the positive effects were somewhat lower that those reported in many sources. The conflicting direction effects for rear end and right-angle crashes justified the conduct of the economic effects analysis to assess the extent to which the increase in rear end crashes negates the benefits for right-angle crashes. This analysis, which was based on an aggregation of rear end and right-angle crash costs for various severity levels, showed that RLC systems do indeed provide a modest aggregate crash-cost benefit.
The opposing effects for the two crash types also implied that RLC systems would be most beneficial at intersections where there are relatively few rear end crashes and many right-angle ones. This was verified in a disaggregate analysis of the economic effect to try to isolate the factors that would favor (or discourage) the installation of RLC systems. That analysis revealed that RLC systems should be considered for intersections with a high ratio of right-angle crashes to rear end crashes, higher proportion of entering AADT on the major road, shorter cycle lengths and intergreen periods, one or more left turn protected phases, and higher entering AADTs. It also revealed the presence of warning signs at both RLC intersections and city limits and the application of high publicity levels will enhance the benefits of RLC systems.
The indications of a spillover effect point to a need for a more definitive study of this issue. That more confidence could not be placed in this aspect of the analysis reflects that this is an observational retrospective study in which RLC installations took place over many years and where other programs and treatments may have affected crash frequencies at the spillover study sites. A prospective study with an explicit purpose of addressing this issue seems to be required.
tl;dr - it's complicated. There are places RLCs make sense and places they don't. Expecting local government to know the difference... good luck with that.
1 - https://www.fhwa.dot.gov/publications/research/safety/05049/
the people who go off into the woods as uber survivalists or whatever die alone and forgotten from an infected toenail or something equally as stupid while the society full of people down the mountain thrive and people remember each other.
its wild to me how many people are suckered in by the never ending fear mongering that prepper businesses push on them without ever thinking it through.
That didn't address what the poster wrote, it's just a cheap reddit style of internet arguing that doesn't add anything. OP is right, society in general tolerates a bunch of regulations as to what and where and how they can drive.
Deaths from road accidents are (somewhat) more tolerated than say murder because of the enormous utility of cars. This is not bewildering to anybody who is not being disingenuous.
"can cause much much more harm."
Cars kill way more people than guns per year. Where do you draw the line on something as subjective as this? It has the capability to cause harm but has it to the degree you're talking about? Its debatable.
Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.
Also remote-operated drones don't need to fear that they will get suddenly shot or stabbed to death by a criminal suspect whose potential crimes they are investigating, like a human cop does; and this would itself have some beneficial effects on policing.
Possible: Perhaps crash into someone? Or worse.
These systems were largely disliked bipartisanly because of those factors.
And the real root problem isn't you or what you believe. The problem is that you don't feel responsible for the side effects that would happen if you got your way any more than a lone piece of litter feels responsible for ruining the park. Nor does society hold you responsible, "it's nobody's fault". So you and everyone else are free to peddle bad solutions to small problems without consequence.
Edit: Perhaps this is just part of a longer arc of societal progress. We used to categorize bad people worthy of being ignored based on group membership they mostly couldn't control, religions, races, stuff like that. As society got better at measurement we realized this was wrong and somewhat stopped doing it. Now we struggle holding groups accountable. All sorts of evil can be done without consequence as long as the responsibility is diluted enough. Maybe something in the future will solve this.
The Bay Area is objectively safe, for example, yet I constantly run into neighbors in affluent neighborhoods who are afraid of venturing various places, letting their kids play outside or bike to school, or just generally exploring around.
I was at a BayFC match last weekend, for example, and ran into the family of an acquaintance from my elementary daughter's school. They have an 8th grader and are trying to get an intra-district transfer approved for high school so she doesn't have to go to the neighborhood school where a student brought a ghost gun on campus 3 years ago (he was arrested and successfully prosecuted, and no one was hurt)... and instead go to the local school where a handful of kids arranged their bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field (and photographed it!) several months ago. My point isn't that either of these crimes is acceptable, but that people tend to be irrational and ignorant of statistical analysis. Both of these are good schools with better than average student outcomes, but families consistently bring their own prejudices into analysis and it creates mild chaos & havoc across the system overall.
Giving away food to homeless is a crime in many places. Bad capitalism.
Feelings of insecurity are manufactured relative to the danger posed:
https://ourworldindata.org/does-the-news-reflect-what-we-die...
I agreed that there could be benefits but that the downside is that they know when and where you go to church, or the grocery, or where you get your hair done, or even when you go on vacation. Her eyes lit up and I she replied that she would have to think about that a bit.
I'm not saying that I changed her mind, but that bringing the consequences down to something she could understand was much better than yelling from the rooftops. Mentioning church is especially impactful with a lot of older folks.
And "While our data extends only to 2018" is... important, yeah?
Happy to provide sources when back at my keeb if rqstd.
I have up-close experience with Flock, as my current city, Bend, Oregon, ended its contract with surveillance company Flock Safety earlier this year, after a public campaign protesting the cams -- and some very active city council meetings. Flock's controversial AI-powered license plate cameras were shut down, and its partnership with local law enforcement ended over privacy concerns.
We weren't the only city to reject Flock cameras: In the past two years, dozens of towns have suspended or deactivated contracts with Flock over concerns about how the cameras could be used, as well as weak contract language. But you might not even know if Flock has come to your town: Sometimes these automated license plate readers, or ALPRs, appear in neighborhoods without warning.
Read more: State Laws Against Surveillance and License Plate Cams
Flock gripped news headlines late last year when it was under the microscope during widespread crackdowns by Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Though Flock doesn't have a direct partnership with federal agencies (a blurry line I'll discuss more), law enforcement agencies are free to share data with departments like ICE, and they frequently do.
One study from the Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington found that at least eight Washington law enforcement agencies shared their Flock data networks directly with ICE in 2025, and 10 more departments allowed ICE backdoor access without explicitly granting the agency permission. Many other reports outline similar activity.
Following Super Bowl ads about finding lost dogs, Flock was under scrutiny about its planned partnership with Ring, Amazon's security brand. The integration would have allowed police to request the use of Ring-brand home security cameras for investigations. Following intense public backlash, Ring cut ties with Flock just like my city did.
To learn more, I spoke to Flock about how the company's surveillance technology is used (and misused). I also spoke with privacy advocates from the American Civil Liberties Union to discuss surveillance concerns and what communities are doing about it.
Flock's presence means license plate cameras -- and these days, much more.
Bloomberg/Contributor/Getty Images
If you hear that Flock is setting up near you, it usually means the installation of ALPR cameras to capture license plate photos and monitor cars on the street.
Flock signs contracts with a wide range of entities, including city governments and law enforcement departments. A neighborhood can also partner with Flock -- for example, if an HOA decides it wants extra eyes on the road, it may choose to use Flock's systems.
When Flock secures a contract, the company installs cameras at strategic locations. Though these cameras are primarily marketed for license plate recognition, Flock reports on its site that its surveillance system is intended to reduce crime, including property crimes such as "mail and package theft, home invasions, vandalism, trespassing, and burglary." The company also says it frequently solves violent crimes like "assault, kidnappings, shootings and homicides."
Flock has recently expanded into other technologies, including advanced cameras that monitor more than just vehicles. Most concerning are the latest Flock drones equipped with high-powered cameras. Flock's "Drone as First Responder" platform automates drone operations, including launching them in response to 911 calls or gunfire. Flock's drones, which reach speeds up to 60 mph, can follow vehicles or people and provide information to law enforcement.
Drones like these can be used to track fleeing suspects. In practice, the key is how law enforcement chooses to use them, and whether states pass laws allowing police to use drones without a warrant -- I'll cover state laws more below, because that's a big part of today's surveillance.
It's important to note that not all cities or neighborhoods refer to Flock Safety by name, even when using its technology. They might mention the Drone as First Responder program, or ALPR cameras, without further details. For example, a March announcement about police drones from the city of Lancaster, California, doesn't mention Flock at all, even though it was the company behind the drone program.
Flock has expanded from cameras to drones, and with that comes greater ability to track people as well as cars.
Connecticut Post/Hearst Newspapers/Getty Images
Flock states on its website that its standard license-plate cameras cannot technically track vehicles, but only take a "point-in-time" image of a car to nab the license plate.
However, due to AI video and image search, contracted parties like local law enforcement can use these tools to piece together license information and form their own timeline of where and when a vehicle went. Adding to those capabilities, Flock also told Forbes that it's making efforts to expand access to include video clips and live feeds.
Flock's machine learning can also note details like a vehicle's body type, color, the condition of the license plate and a wide variety of identifiers, like roof racks, paint colors and what you have stored in the back. Flock rarely calls this AI, but it's similar to AI-recognition features you can find in the latest home security cameras
A Flock spokesperson told me the company has boundaries and does not use facial recognition. "We have more traditional video cameras that can send an alert when one sees if a person is in the frame, for instance, in a business park at 2 a.m. or in the public parks after dark."
By "traditional" cameras, Flock refers to those that capture a wider field of view -- more than just cars and license plates -- and can record video rather than just snapshot images.
The information Flock can access provides a comprehensive picture that police can use to track cars by running searches on their software. Just like you might Google a local restaurant, police can search for a basic vehicle description and retrieve recent matches that the surveillance equipment may have found. Those searches can sometimes extend to people, too.
"We have an investigative tool called Freeform that lets you use natural language prompts to find the investigative lead you're looking for, including the description of what a person's clothes may be," the Flock spokesperson told me.
Unlike red-light cameras, Flock's cameras can be installed nearly anywhere and snap vehicle ID images for all cars. There are Safe Lists that people can use to help Flock cameras filter out vehicles by filling out a form with their address and license plate to mark their vehicle as a "resident."
The opposite is also true: Flock cameras can use a hot list of known, wanted vehicles and send automatic alerts to police if one is found.
With Flock drones, these intelligent searches become even more complete, allowing cameras to track where cars are going and identify people. That raises additional privacy concerns about having eyes in the sky over your backyard.
"While flying, the drone faces forward, looking at the horizon, until it gets to the call for service, at which point the camera looks down," the Flock spokesperson said. "Every flight path is logged in a publicly available flight dashboard for appropriate oversight."
Yet unlike personal security options, there's no easy way to opt out of this kind of surveillance. You can't turn off a feature, cancel a subscription or throw away a device to avoid it.
And even though more than 45 cities have canceled Flock contracts amid public outcry, that doesn't guarantee that all surveillance cameras will be removed from the designated area.
When I reached out to the police department in Eugene, another city in Oregon that ended its Flock contract, the PD director of public information told me that, while there were concerns about certain vulnerabilities and data security requirements with the particular vendor, the technology itself is not the problem. "Eugene Police's ALPR system experience has demonstrated the value of leveraging ALPR technology to aid investigations … the department must ensure that any vendors meet the highest standards."
License plates can be closely connected to your personal information.
Joa_Souza/Getty Images
Flock's stance, as outlined in its privacy and ethics guide, is that license plate numbers and vehicle descriptions aren't personal information. The company says it doesn't surveil "private data" -- only cars and general descriptive markers.
But vehicle information can be considered personal because it's legally tied to the vehicle's owner. Privacy laws, including proposed federal legislation from 2026, prohibit the release of personal information from state motor vehicle records in order to protect citizens.
However, those laws typically include exemptions for legal actions and law enforcement, sometimes even for private security companies.
AI detection also plays a role. When someone can identify a vehicle through searches like "red pickup truck with a dog in the bed," that tracking goes beyond basic license plates to much more personal information about the driver and their life. It may include the bumper stickers, what can be seen in the backseat and whether a vehicle has a visible gun rack.
Flock's practices -- like its recent push toward live video feeds and drones to track suspects -- move out of the gray area, and that's where privacy advocates are rightly concerned. Despite its policy, it appears you can track specific people using Flock tech. You'll just need to pay more to do so, such as upgrading from ALPRs to Flock's suspect-following drone program, or using its Freeform tool to track someone by the clothes they're wearing.
Flock's security practices are solid, but it's the company's users I'm worried about.
Anadolu/Contributor/Getty Images
Flock states on its website that it stores data for 30 days on Amazon Web Services cloud storage and then deletes it. It uses KMS-based encryption (a managed encryption key system common in AWS) and reports that all images and related data are encrypted from on-device storage to cloud storage.
When Flock collects criminal justice information, or sensitive data managed by law enforcement, it's only available to official government agencies, not an entity like your local HOA. Because video data is encrypted throughout its transfer to the end user, employees at Flock cannot access it. These are the same kind of security practices I look for when reviewing home security cameras, but there are more complications here.
However, Flock also makes it clear that its customers -- whether that's a local police department, private business or another institution -- own their data and control access to it. Once end users access that data, Flock's own privacy measures don't do much to help. That raises concerns about the security of local law enforcement systems, each of which has its own data regulations and accountability practices.
Flock can audit camera access, but that hasn't prevented bad behaviors so far.
Matthew Jonas/Boulder Daily Camera/Getty Images
You may have noticed a theme: Flock provides powerful surveillance technology, and the final results are deeply influenced by how customers use it. That can be creepy at best, and an illegal abuse of power at worst.
Since Flock Safety began partnering with law enforcement, a growing number of officers have been found abusing the surveillance system. In one instance, a Kansas police chief used Flock cameras 164 times while tracking an ex. In another case, a sheriff in Texas lied about using Flock to "track a missing person," but was later found to be investigating a possible abortion. In Georgia, a police chief was arrested for using Flock to stalk and harass citizens. In Virginia, a man sued the city of Norfolk over purported privacy violations and discovered that Flock cameras had been used to track him 526 times, around four times per day.
Those are just a few examples from a long list, giving real substance to worries about a surveillance state and a lack of checks and balances. When I asked Flock how its systems protect against abuse and overreach, a spokesperson referred to its accountability feature, an auditing tool that "records every search that a user of Flock conducts in the system." Flock used this tool during the Georgia case above, which ultimately led to the arrest of the police chief.
While police search logs are often tracked like this, reports indicate that many authorities start searches with vague terms and cast a wide net using terms like "investigation," "crime" or a broad immigration term like "deportee" to gain access to as much data as possible. While police can't avoid Flock's audit logs, they can use general or discriminatory terms -- or skip filling out fields entirely -- to evade investigations and hide intent.
Regardless of the auditing tools, the onus is on local organizations to manage investigations, accountability and transparency. That brings me to a particularly impactful current event.
While ICE can't directly access Flock's system, they tend to get a lot of help from local law enforcement. Douglas Rissing/Getty Images
ICE is the elephant in the room in my Flock guide. Does Flock share its surveillance data with federal agencies such as ICE? Yes, the federal government frequently has access to that data, but how it gets access is important.
Flock states on its website that it has not shared data or partnered with ICE or any other Department of Homeland Security officials since terminating its pilot programs in August 2025. Flock says its focus is now on local law enforcement, but that comes with a hands-off approach that doesn't control what happens to information downstream.
"Flock has no authority to share data on our customers' behalf, nor the authority to disrupt their law enforcement operations," the Flock spokesperson told me. "Local police all over the country collaborate with federal agencies for various reasons, with or without Flock technology. "
That collaboration has grown more complex. As Democratic Senator Ron Wyden from Oregon stated in an open letter to Flock Safety, "local" law enforcement isn't that local anymore, especially when 75% of Flock's law enforcement customers have enrolled in the National Lookup Tool, which allows information sharing across the country between all participants.
"Flock has built a dangerous platform in which abuse of surveillance data is almost certain," Wyden wrote. "The company has adopted a see-no-evil approach of not proactively auditing the searches done by its law enforcement customers because, as the company's Chief Communications Officer told the press, 'It is not Flock's job to police the police.'"
Police department sharing isn't always easy to track, but reporting from 404 Media found that police departments across the country have been creating Flock searches with reasons listed as "immigration," "ICE," or "ICE warrant," among others. Again, since police can put whatever terms they want in these fields -- depending on local policies -- we don't know for sure how common it is to look up info for ICE.
Additionally, there's not always an official process or chain of accountability for sharing this data. In Oregon, reports found that a police department was conducting Flock searches on behalf of ICE and the FBI via a simple email thread.
"When this kind of surveillance power is in malevolent hands -- and in the case of ICE, I feel comfortable saying a growing number of Americans view it as a bad actor -- these companies are empowering actions the public increasingly finds objectionable," a lawyer with the ACLU told a Salt Lake City news outlet earlier this year.
With the myriad ways law enforcement shares Flock data with the federal government, it may seem like there's not much you can do. But one powerful tool is advocating for new laws.
State laws differ drastically when it comes to Flock surveillance, but legislation is on the rise.
Klaus Vedfelt/Getty Images
In the past two years, a growing number of state laws have been passed or proposed to address Flock Safety, license plate readers and surveillance. Much of this legislation is bipartisan, or has been passed by both traditionally right- and left-leaning states, although some go further than others.
When I contacted the ACLU to learn what legislation is most effective in situations like this, Chad Marlow, senior policy counsel and lead on the ACLU's advocacy work for Flock and related surveillance, gave several examples.
"I would limit the allowed uses for ALPR," Marlow told me. "While some uses, like for toll collection and Amber Alerts, with the right guardrails in place, are not particularly problematic, some ALPRs are used to target communities of color and low-income communities for fine/fee enforcement and for minor crime enforcement, which can exacerbate existing policing inequities."
This type of harmful ALPR targeting is typically used to both oppress minorities and bring in a greater number of fees for local law organizations -- problems that existed long before AI recognition camera, but have been exacerbated by the technology.
New legislation can help, but it needs to be carefully crafted. The most effective laws fall into two categories. The first is requiring any collected ALPR or related data to be deleted within a certain time frame -- the shorter, the better. New Hampshire wins here with a 3-minute rule.
"For states that want a little more time to see if captured ALPR data is relevant to an ongoing investigation, keeping the data for a few days is sufficient," Marlow said. "Some states, like Washington and Virginia, recently adopted 21-day limits, which is the very outermost acceptable limit."
The second type of promising law makes it illegal to share ALPR and similar data outside the state (such as with ICE) and has been passed by states like Virginia, Illinois and California.
"Ideally, no data should be shared outside the collecting agency without a warrant," Marlow said. "But some states have chosen to prohibit data sharing outside of the state, which is better than nothing, and does limit some risks."
Vermont, meanwhile, requires a strict approval process for ALPRs that, by 2025, left no law enforcement agency in the state using license cams.
But what happens if police choose to ignore laws and continue using Flock as they see fit? That's already happened. In California, for example, police in Los Angeles and San Diego were found sharing information with Homeland Security in 2025, in violation of a state law that bans organizations from sharing license plate data out of state.
When this happens, the recourse is typically a lawsuit, either from the state attorney general or a class action by the community, both of which are ongoing in California in 2026. But what should people do while legislation and lawsuits proceed?
Many other AI surveillance tools are appearing, including some aimed at law enforcement and businesses.
NurPhoto/Contributor/Getty Images
Marlow acknowledged that individuals can't do much about Flock surveillance without bans or legislation.
"Flock identifies and tracks your vehicle by scanning its license plate, and covering your license plate is illegal, so that is not an option," he told me.
However, Marlow suggested minor changes that could make a difference for those who are seriously worried. "When people are traveling to sensitive locations, they could take public transportation and pay with cash (credit cards can be tracked, as can share-a-rides) or get a lift from a friend, but those aren't really practical on an everyday basis."
Ditching or restricting Flock Safety is one way communities are fighting back against what they consider to be unnecessary surveillance with the potential for abuse. But AI surveillance doesn't begin or end with one company.
When multiple companies, including Motorola, are offering similar tools, the problem becomes much larger than Flock Safety tech.
Motorola Solutions
Flock Safety is an intermediary that provides technology in demand by powerful organizations. It's hardly the only one with these kinds of high-tech eyes -- it's just one of the first to enter the market at a national level. If Flock were gone, another company would likely step in to fill the gap, unless restricted by law.
As Flock's integration with other apps and cameras becomes more complex, it's going to be harder to tell where Flock ends and another solution begins, even without rival companies showing up with the latest AI tracking.
But rivals are showing up, from Shield AI for military intelligence to commercial applications by companies like Ambient.ai, Verkada's AI security searches and the infamous intelligence firm Palantir, all looking for ways to integrate and expand. Motorola, in particular, is in on the action with its VehicleManager platform.
If you want to take an extra step, you can volunteer, donate and participate in a variety of anti-surveillance activities.
Institute for Justice
The first step is being aware, including knowing which new cameras your city is installing and which software partnerships your local law enforcement has. If you don't like what you discover, find ways to participate in the decision-making process, like attending open city council meetings on Flock, as in Bend.
On a broader level, keep track of the legislation your state is considering regarding Flock and similar surveillance contracts and operations, as these will have the greatest long-term impact. Blocking data from being shared out of state and requiring police to delete surveillance ASAP are particularly important steps. You can contact your state senators and representatives to encourage legislation like this.
When you're wondering what to share with politicians, I recommend something like what Marlow told me: "The idea of keeping a location dossier on every single person just in case one of us turns out to be a criminal is just about the most un-American approach to privacy I can imagine."
You can also sign up for and donate to projects that are addressing Flock concerns, such as The Plate Privacy Project from The Institute for Justice. I'm currently talking to them about the latest events, and I'll update if they have any additional tips for us.
Keep following CNET home security, where I break down the latest news you should know, like privacy settings to turn on, security camera settings you may want to turn off and how surveillance intersects with our daily lives. Things are changing fast, but we're staying on top of it.
• Meta-analyses (studies that average the results of multiple studies) in the UK show that video surveillance has no statistically significant impact on crime.
• Preliminary studies on video surveillance systems in the US show little to no positive impact on crime.
https://www.aclu.org/sites/default/files/images/asset_upload...
Societies that are strongly collectivist in nature tend to align closer with expanded state powers and don't view it as an affront.
The techno-individualist subculture that is common on HN and Reddit is that - a subculture.
Techno-individualism cannot coexist with collectivist culture where the primacy of the state is held as sacrosanct and supreme.
And now that countries like Russia [0], Iran [1], and China [2] have been expanding hybrid warfare capabilities across the West - especially now that Europe is now expeiencing the largest conventional war since WW2 - we need to recognize that we are no long in a state of peace.
[0] - https://www.ft.com/content/2084e87d-d491-4852-8449-f90b73d47...
[1] - https://www.ft.com/content/adc3e954-5928-471b-b7f2-e4385bbca...
[2] - https://www.ft.com/content/63720831-8805-497d-8145-1713e450a...
The activist needs to first go to where the people are.
Yea, so the the next layer is, why are people committing crimes? I've made it clear I don't think you can just "turn on safety."
> Wealth inequality raises crime risk
So would we have that big of a problem with cameras everywhere if they recorded locally and we had UBI?
> but community cohesion partially buffers that effect.
How do you measure "community cohesion?"
First to match the graph you make sure you pick 'Larceny - From Vehicle' only (there are some others one might argue matter) and ensure you're only counting incidents once (many rows reference the same incident). That lets us recreate the original graph.
When looking at many things I like to look at seasonal effects just to see, and it doesn't look like they are significant here (but you can see the Mar 2020 drop to the next year quite easily which I like): https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/images/2/2e/SFPD_Vehicle_Bre...
I also tried overlaying various line charts but that's useless for visually identifying the break.
One thing I thought would be fun is to run a changepoint algorithm blindly https://wiki.roshangeorge.dev/w/File:SFPD_Vehicle_Break-Ins_...
I like PELT because it appeals to my sensibilities (you don't say ahead of time how many changepoints you want to find - you set an energy/cost param and let it roll) and it finds that one changepoint. You can have some fun with the other algos and changing the amount of breakpoints or changing the PELT cost function. And then you can have even more fun by excluding 2020 or excluding Mar 2020 onwards or replacing it by estimates from the previous years (quite suspect considering what we're trying to do but hey we're having fun - a bunch of algos all flag Nov 2023 as some moment of truth)
Anyway, anyone curious should download the data. It's pretty straightforward to use and if I goofed up with off-by-one or whatever, you can go see for yourself.
It's like when you try to keep something from being taken by bolting it down and they just come in and steal the bolts too. Some of that's just a part of life.
I'm not saying that it couldn't be true, but we have no way of concluding that from just comparing such rates. There are many differences in daily life and thresholds for reporting beyond surveillance levels.
Foucault used to distinguish between models of authority that operate on "make die and let live" vs "let die and make live". China's the former, the US with its moral busybodies both in progressive and religious flavors the latter.
The US now is a society of public disorder and personal policing, China is a society of public order and largely indifference in private life. Of course the former creates anxiety. American Beauty, a film about permanent surveillance without any state, would make no sense in China.
Personally I like having little cop boxes in 5 minute walking distances in Tokyo. There are people who are very against it, bring up bad encounters, but net positive, I would say.
There is historical and current evidence for the danger of those tools. Continuous danger for the whole population of an affected state. Some countries has learned from that, like Germany from the Stasi. They have some educative materials on that topic. You should google it up.
> Also, taking a serial killer who murdered 8 women and dismembered several of them off the streets to me outweighs quite a bit of harm. But that's just me.
Unfortunately it is not just you. Many people are willing to give up their privacy for something that has been suggested to them as "security", based upon fear mongering and abstract dangers to them. Fear is a very powerful tool.
You're also ignoring the risk here. These devices open up a whooooole new class of mistakes that can be made. There have already been people wrongfully jailed due to surveillance technology.
It can't be a calm, reassuring presence, offer a kind smile, or give directions. It only disconnects the police force from the policed community. Its presence will only raise tensions and paranoia. And that's with unarmed drones!
That's unconstitutional. Use a regular camera and it's fine for some reason.
When our parties got called in, the spotlight would be the warning that the cops were a few minutes away and it was time to run.
Lots of cities have manned aircraft loitering during busy times that will respond to a call before ground units
A lot risks associated with "venturing various places" (which specific places?) and generally exploring around are not well-tracked in official crime statistics, precisely because the people who are affected by these crimes don't expect the police or criminal justice system to do much about them.
Arranging your bodies in a swastika pattern on the football field and photographing it isn't a crime in the US (nor should it be). It's reasonable to be more concerned about the school where a student brought a gun to campus. Although really both of these things sound like isolated incidents that don't say much one way or the other about what things would generally be like at either school for that incoming student.
How is this due to capitalism?
I mean, I can maybe see how you can tie it to NIMBYism, and from there to capitalism through the desire to maintain or increase property values. But that's a stretch, and only one mechanism
There are many drivers for this type of regulation, some more well-meaning than others. Most of them would not go away simply because we ceased private ownership of the means of production
Good job talking to your community. The first step is that people are aware of the cameras - for my neighbors, most did not know about them, and immediately found it creepy.
The time to build your community is now, before things get so bad every helpless individual is looking for a group to save them.
There's no winning.
If EMS has to "search you out" so does the drone.
At least in my County, we actually get very good triangulation info from 911. It was very rare that Dispatch told us they only had Level 2(IIRC) location info (which might be to several hundred feet).
FAR more common was people who actually told us the -wrong- location. Car accidents that were several miles up the road from their location. Saying Blah St SE when they meant Blah Rd NE, etc.
Drones don't solve for that problem. They're going to the wrong location, too.
Reminds me of this classic: https://static.poder360.com.br/2020/11/2020-11-07-22.31.49.j...
Yeah, I'm all for public safety in theory but seems like these days that's just a dog whistle for "go hard on whatever sort of petty deviance I don't like" and so I'm unwilling to support things like that in the default case. It's all just so tiresome.
And here they are telling you that you cannot use your own property to help alleviate issues in your community. That sounds more like an exaggeration of Communist attempts at division of labor and to 'organize' a civilization.
Hopefully there was nothing wrong with posting a news article with a graph instead of doing the data analysis myself.
It will absolutely happen in corrupt departments, or those involving an officer with those skills and access. But data that is uploaded is infinitely harder to erase than simply turning off the camera in the first place.
I used to live in both Seattle and Portland.
I took my family to Portland last year and wanted to show them the Ground Kontrol Arcade.
Before I even parked the rental car, some vagrant on a BMX bike threatened to murder us.
[1]: I imagine this includes things like mental heath help, housing, and other related social safety nets.
And I think it was great you shared the news article! For many others, analyses one does oneself are less believable. I prefer doing it myself to convince myself but I wouldn’t expect it to convince others. Here I did it because I wanted to know what the fact is and I always have trouble with picking change points on a bar graph without all the ticks marked.
I put it at this level because it feels supplemental to your link not because it’s a debunking of your comment or whatever though perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47690707 is the best place to do it.
One side fights against government bullying and the other… put security cameras up.
Decisions, decisions
that said, I wouldn't be surprised if the Amish already have a small stockpile for practical use cases like hunting and keeping away the English
Because it's a social problem, not a technology problem.
At the same time, just because these instances of "missing" tape happen, does not mean that body cams and jailhouse CCTV are useless. We would not take those away. Likewise for the future drone footage
I'm sure you can come up with a lot more ideas using your imagination.
The point is that the drone is fast enough to arrive first, and do the searching so that you don't have to. It's just one of many possible scenarios.
I totally understand the argument that this might not be the most effective use of money, but I honestly don't understand the lack of appreciation for the number of places this could be used effectively.
Which isn't necessarily where the most incidents are.
I don't see how removing the cameras is compatible with the first amendment, but if you have the right of "speech" to record me in public chasing every place I go in a manner that is the envy of any stalker, I ought to have the right of "speech" not to "say anything" (compelled speech of showing my plate).
There's an enormous drop in edit: late 2019, and the second drop starts in 2023.
https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/your-sfpd/policies/depart...
> Starting on March 19, 2024, Flock Safety began installing ALPR cameras in various strategic locations across San Francisco. This rollout is expected to take place over the next 90 days. Per 19B ALPR policy, the administration of the Flock ALPR system is the responsibility of the Investigations Bureau.
How did the Flock cameras cause two crime drops before their installation?
The article's note about 2018 is talking about extending backwards, not forwards. It's entirely accurate, and a direct quote from your link.
The cameras were added where the black rectangle is here: https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
Drawing an equivalence is foolish.
> and do the searching so that you don't have to
The searching that we did just isn't really solved by drones (and I love them, some of my best photography is from a drone). It's things like "obscured house numbers on a street", "ambiguous address", not "person lost in a forest". Now if you want to talk about the use of drones for SAR? Absolutely. But for the vast majority of 911 "attempt to locate", getting there quickly is rarely the issue. We can get there quickly and still spend minutes figuring out that you're actually living on a flag property (where your home is behind another, but you share a driveway).
When was that? Because in 1977 they defended Nazi's free speech to demonstrate in a town that had jewish people as half its population so it tried to block them, and I don't recall them doing anything nearly that controversial since.
https://www.aclu.org/news/free-speech/the-skokie-case-how-i-...
I’m not seeing anything I can call a Covid spike
The only problem with the license plate readers is that the "teens" drive cars with fake tags. They deliberately copy the plate numbers from some granny with the same model. Makes it fun when the SWAT team knocks on Granny's door.
As for fire services, in my city there is always a lead SUV vehicle (I think a captain or supervisor) who is a few blocks ahead of the actual heavy trucks. Presumably to get someone on site as quickly as possible; which made me believe that a drone could assist in that role. But I accept what you say, that there are too many limitations for it to help much, even if it can arrive quicker.
Yes, the drones should be secure. Yes there should be measures to make sure that they're not abused. But none of that takes away from anything i've said, which is ONLY to point out the situations where they could be useful. And people seem to be having a very negative visceral reaction to even considering the possibility.
Also, i'm not recommending or supporting Flock, just the concept of drone use in general.
So link it.
https://www.oyez.org/cases/2017/16-402
> The government's warrantless acquisition of Carpenter's cell-site records violated his Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable searches and seizures. Chief Justice John Roberts authored the opinion for the 5-4 majority. The majority first acknowledged that the Fourth Amendment protects not only property interests, but also reasonable expectations of privacy. Expectations of privacy in this age of digital data do not fit neatly into existing precedents, but tracking person's movements and location through extensive cell-site records is far more intrusive than the precedents might have anticipated.
Or in United States v. Jones (cited in https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf):
> Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
It seems clear these cameras can hit some kind of threshold where they're common enough and interlinked enough to amount to unconstitutional surveilance. We don't know exactly where that threshold is yet.
The chart is trending down by January 2020, changes directions (upwards) right around the March 2020 spot, and again around (down) the July 2023 spot.
The fact that they only have data going back to 2018 means it's hard to say if the pre-COVID stuff was the norm or unusual.
To be super-clear, here's the chart annotated to show that 90 day window (black rectangle) in which the cameras were installed. https://imgur.com/a/i00Gna0
"that drop is obviously in early 2020", to reemphasize, is several years before the cameras got installed.
- is trivially defeated by teenagers
- is used by police departments as evidence to legally justify violent raids for property damage
- whose data is mishandled by law enforcement agencies who don't do due diligence
... should have more widespread adoption and support?
I might question the benefits of making the poor area even poorer via fines they likely can't afford. I might wonder if there are confounding factors like poorly maintained roads and vehicles at play. I might wonder if the yellow lights have the same timing as in the suburbs.
Trying to interpret viewing and recording the plate as speech but not displaying it as speech is trying to have your cake and eat it too. If the camera can stalk my car everywhere and record it under auspices of 'speech', it's only logical I can hide it as 'speech.'
Precedent is often crap and wrong until someone can find a good case paired with good lawyers to rectify.
Edit: Throttled so editing to reply
Precedent is randomly set by whoever gets there first often with a random case and a defendant with zero funds desperate to minimize their situation (for example without the funds to challenge the legality of polygraph/flock versus polygraph/flocks paid 'experts'). Although now political people are trying to game the system and shop very thought out cases to specific friendly courts to help put their finger on establishing precedent. After building enough such cases in lower courts, moneyed interests then shop it to the next level. Then with enough at the next level, to the Supremes.
It's a pretty awful, unintentional by design and fairly random 'legal system' with a huge bias towards those with more money and or the huge disparity in power of the Federal government, it's prosecutors, trial tax and the ridiculousness of 'if you exercise your constitutional rights you risk an additional 20-50 years in prison' versus someone broke, whose life has already been ruined by time in jail (and their fight beaten out of them), just wanting to go home as soon as possible.
And when those disempowered have the courage to risk the trial tax and do happen to stumble upon a win you get the strategic use of either pleas bargains or dropping the case by prosecutors to prevent precedent, or the abuse by judges of 'as applied' rulings in order to again prevent precedent from being set even when the case was won.
One side has all the power. One side has huge threats (in the form of trial tax). One side literally holds in you prison and has 100% control over every aspect of your life as you try to fight them and uses things like diesel therapy or the many other ways the have to apply to break you down for 'being difficult'. One side has the power to just drop cases it if risks precedent they don't like. And one side has the power to label a case 'as applied' to prevent precedent they don't like. It's a pretty crap system if you want fair unmanipulated precedents to come out of it. It's a great system if you want money/federal prosecutors/judges to be able to put their finger on the scale and set the outcome.
Cops -did- show up. "Did you have a green light" "I did." Less than 30 seconds of questions. Goes to the other driver, same, is back in under a minute. "Well, he said he's absolutely sure he had a green light, so I'm citing you for failing to obey a traffic signal".
There were no cameras in the area, no witnesses, just the two drivers. But the other driver was a 50 something male, and my step daughter was 17 and upset because it was our car. So the cop took his word and cited her.
Hmm, vehicle black box? If that showed that she had come to and been at a stop, and then accelerated, that would at least imply she had been at a red light, and gone when it turned green, as she said.
No, no interest there. Even the insurer (fine, whatever), said "unless we're facing a six digit payout, we're not pulling the black box".
Don't even start me on the fact that after our insurance denied liability, the other driver sued her in small claims court for $10,000 for a car that had a KBB of $1,450. And the small claims judge noted that he technically couldn't sue a minor in small claims, but required us to go to mandatory arbitration, where the arbitrator said, quote, "I don't understand why, as a decent human being, if insurance will pay out, you don't just accept the claim." (Yeahhhh, filed a complaint about that, too. And here I stop, because I feel my blood pressure rising lol).
Florida criminal code:
"790.19 Shooting into or throwing deadly missiles into dwellings, public or private buildings, occupied or not occupied; vessels, aircraft, buses, railroad cars, streetcars, or other vehicles.—Whoever, wantonly or maliciously, shoots at, within, or into, or throws any missile or hurls or projects a stone or other hard substance which would produce death or great bodily harm, at, within, or in any public or private building, occupied or unoccupied, or public or private bus or any train, locomotive, railway car, caboose, cable railway car, street railway car, monorail car, or vehicle of any kind which is being used or occupied by any person, or any boat, vessel, ship, or barge lying in or plying the waters of this state, or aircraft flying through the airspace of this state shall be guilty of a felony of the second degree, punishable as provided in s. 775.082, s. 775.083, or s. 775.084."You shouldn't pin your ideals on anything as flawed as the Constitution of the US. It was barely a workable system to begin with, and who knows how long it can last now.
"Precedent is often crap" isn't really the basis for any cohesive judicial philosophy or legal thought process.
I'm not aware of any precedent anywhere that approaches "ALPRs violate 4A" territory, it's when other stuff happens that's beyond simply "$lp_id was seen by $camera on $datetime" that I've seen courts start to talk about reasonableness and privacy.
It's not just auto insurance. Every government, government adjacent and highly regulated process is just like that.
It's not about right and wrong or fairness or making the responsible party pay or saving the children or protecting the environment or preventing sub-prime loans or enforcing building code or or whatever the alleged pretext is. It's about having an efficient process turn the subjective into the quantifiable and/or assign financial responsibility and do so in a manner that's not flagrantly wrong so often that a "large enough to be a problem" amount of people seek recourse outside the system (like smoking the CEO on the sidewalk or armoring a bulldozer or whatever).
But of course, marketing the system as though it's about right and wrong or fairness or whatever is what they do as a means toward what the point actually is so it's easy to understand why you think it failed instead of worked perfectly.
Automated mass surveillance of license plates should also be illegal.
Alternative framing: Given limited resources and lots of things to care about, they pick the specific cases that best improve the freedoms they're interested in protecting.
In the case of the Second Amendment, they decided to let the NRA handle it, as that seems to be working just fine.
2018: the ACLU supports the NRA's First Amendment challenge to Governor Cuomo's attempt to convince NY financial institutions not to do business with the NRA.
2019: they defended a conservative student magazine which was denied funding by UCSD.
2020: they filed a brief supporting antisemitic protestors picketing a synagogue on the Sabbath. They also supported a Catholic school's religious right to make religious-based choices in hiring and firing teachers.
I'm just quoting the fruits of five minutes of research here, so I won't go on (but there's more). Is it possible that you're reacting to the radical conservative stereotyping of the ACLU rather than the actual actions of the organization?
Then we have to figure out why it dropped so much pre-COVID. Because the timeline doesn’t say it can possibly be Flock.
Same for the 2023 drop. The timeline simply doesn’t match up with Flock’s rollout.
0: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/06/06/us/aclu-free-speech.html
I think this is particularly noted as a post-2022 shift
Guess what, all the roads around me are private easements, all privately owned, and they are that way 90% to town. A good portion of my trips never touch a publicly owned road yet I'm still required to display my plate on them. We don't even have public, tax maintained roads where I live (I literally have to bring out a tractor and fix them myself when they wear down). Yet the compelled 'speech' of displaying the license plate is required even then while driving your car on your privately owned non-gated road.
The ACLU should defend people who suck ass and another group should defend the heroes who beat their ass for saying awful shit.
The Second is probably the amendment least in need of defending by the ACLU. It's well covered, and pretty much a third rail of American politics.
Many farmers have plateless farm trucks, people who live in the woods have plateless UTVs that they drive on private dirt and gravel roads, etc.
So maybe you pick the anti-ICE protester instead of the Nazi to help out. Both got shot with pepper balls, both had their rights infringed upon. Why not pick the one who isn't a complete ass to establish the same precedent with?
Therefore it does appear the plates are required even though they are fully privately owned roads and privately maintained. Because our roads don't meet the definition of 'private' road in my state even though they're completely private.
Not legal advice.
Do you think your local DOT is corrupt? I think mine is inept, but not corrupt.
It is like requiring privately owned “public” wifi to collect ID from users. We just don’t do that kind of thing here in the US!
They've explicitly said the opposite.
https://www.aclu.org/news/civil-liberties/defending-speech-w...
2023: "We joined Young Americans for Freedom, the Cato Institute, and other unlikely partners in filing an amicus brief on behalf of the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression in its challenge to New York’s new law regulating 'hateful conduct' in social media."