This is a quite scary map. They are all over my local area. It may technically be possible to route a drive around them, but if you take the most convenient path between any two points at least one camera will spot you. I'd have to leave my neighborhood through back roads and enter local shopping areas through sidestreets.
This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.
Download osm data, extract roads and surveillance, gpd overlay how=difference, remove/edit the different osmid's, write to pbf file, convert to obf file w/ osmandmapcreator, import into OsmAnd.
Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.
> Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs [that we -- regular people -- know about] on your phone [while still being observed by the ones we don't know about].
I can't speak to flock but I know that other vendors in the space have software designed to calculate optimal locations to maximize probability at least one license plate scan for every trip taken.
Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
They do, especially in cities and wealthy suburbs (and honestly a lot of poor rural areas too).
The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.
No they don’t. You are conflating “any” with “every”.
In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.
It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.
wow. quite literally the only ones in my area are surveilling the county park / community center. that's creepy. I'll just have to assume they're doing something creepier at the public library.
Uh speak for yourself but some of us are doing the good crimes and would rather like to continue that fight from outside prison and without being shot in the face.
We are all being investigated by the Feds 24/7 — that's what dragnet surveillance is: indiscriminate investigation at scale to be used retroactively.
"Don't do anything bad and nothing will happen" is frankly asinine to me, personally. That same logic could extend to stop-and-frisk or random door-to-door visits to check for citizenship.
It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.
I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.
What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.
There's a disclaimer when you first open the page that the map is incomplete and that users need to submit the data. It's possible that data hasn't been submitted/parsed yet
You can't rely on Flock's "transparency" reports either, they're woefully inadequate. In our County, the Sheriff spoke of a PD in the County getting a Flock hit. It was news to many, including Flock's transparency site, that that PD was a user of their services.
But the cameras that the law enforcement officers canvas in the area aren't centrally aggregated and tagged with meta data such that they can be queried at scale.
There have been numerous instances where cops used it to stalk exes, etc. If it isn't already, it will be used to stalk a blacklist of dissidents. It will continue to happen as long as the system exists.
> However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop
At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.
Flock, like Palantir, is the Torment Nexus from the famous novel Don’t Create The Torment Nexus.
Considering the potential and demonstrated abuse there must be more robust guardrails than currently exist. The required level of safety is more like “nuclear launch codes” or “commercial airliner”, not “local used car lot landing page”.
If they're not already exempted by law, legislators are likely to carve out exemptions. Federally, the FOIA already exempts the government from releasing data that would violate privacy (which was one of the hurdles to releasing Epstein related documents prior to Congress passing a law to demand it).
Isn't the entire argument for these based on the fact that people don't have an expectation of privacy in a public place? Not that I'm sure they won't try to make an excuse as to why it's different, but as far as I'm aware, you're allowed to just film in public.
This is not an issue of being filmed in public, this is an issue of not having the choice to opt in or out of the aggregated data harvesting performed by unregulated AI models owned by unregulated for-profit corporations that have no legislative oversight or safeguards.
If a human followed me around in public recording me, went through every frame and highlighted my face, my car, my license plate, dents and scratches that identify my car, where I'm going, what I'm doing, cross referencing that to other public information to build a dossier, I would have a solid case of harassment against that person. That's some stalker shit.
The bills going through Washington's legislature (where the original parent was talking about re: release via public information laws) do try and address this such that the systems aren't massive dragnets of everybody, always but far more targeted, I think.
An agency may access, operate, or use an automated license plate reader system and its associated data only for the following authorized purposes:
(a) Any law enforcement agency may use an automated license plate reader system for the purpose of comparing captured automated license
plate reader data with:
(i) Data on any of the following watch lists maintained by either a federal or Washington state agency: The department of licensing, the state criminal justice information system, the federal bureau of investigation kidnappings and missing persons list, and the Washington missing persons list; or
(ii) License plate numbers that have been manually entered into a state or local automated license plate reader system database, upon an officer's determination that the license plate numbers are relevant and material to an investigation of a vehicle that is:
(A) Stolen;
(B) Associated with a missing or endangered person;
(C) Registered to an individual for whom there is an outstanding
felony warrant; or
(D) Related to or involved in a felony.
33
(b) Any parking enforcement agency may use an automated license
plate reader system for the following purposes:
(i) Enforcing time restrictions on the use of parking spaces; or
(ii) Identifying vehicles on a watch list for impoundment or immobilization under a local ordinance enacted under RCW 46.55.240,
provided the list includes only license plates of vehicles subject to
that ordinance.
(c) An automated license plate reader system may be used as a
component of photo toll systems authorized by RCW 47.56.795 or
47.46.105
(d) Any transportation agency may use an automated license plate
reader system for the following purposes:
(i) Providing real-time traffic information to the public,
traffic modeling, and traffic studies such as determining
construction delays and route use; and
(ii) Enforcing commercial vehicle systems at Washington state
patrol enforcement sites and weigh stations.
That said, the only thing that really stops them from being massive dragnets of everybody always would essentially be how they're configured, which obviously can change. I think we've seen enough misuse of systems and tools throughout history that it's worthwhile to be mindful of creating easily misused systems and tools.
Coincidentally, a nearby county has just announced that they have begun installing new Flock cameras [0].
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
> Small counties generate huge revenues with traffic cameras.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
Until they start changing speed limits, adjusting the timing on yellow lights, or just saying you ran a stop sign when you didn't and - oops! - they happened to have their dashcam off or their car angled so the actual intersection was just out of view.
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
Before posting that you couldn't Google the Milwaukee cop who got busted for abusing Flock camera access? From just a week ago?
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
So you think you can solve police accountability and keep the cameras? I admire that level of ambition. Have you got the Nobel prize nominations lined up already?
> Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
Woof. There is one that I basically must drive by everyday close to where I live. How can I figure out who is responsible for its installation so I can let them know how I feel (and will vote) about it?
The only flock cameras indicated in my town are the canonical Home Depot arrangement. I'm pretty sure it's part of their standard operating procedures at this point. The effect these have had on the in store experience (at my location) is the primary thing that has me interested in limited deployments. Shopping at HD prior to the ALPRs was a horrible time. I think they finally caught the guy who was stealing the little screws out of the irrigation vacuum breakers. You can actually get a complete, unopened factory product most of the time now.
I personally know 3 victims of brutally violent crime. Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these cases, where violence occurred in broad, open daylight near main roads and highways. Crimes occurred in left-leaning, anti-police small midwest city. All of the victims were women.
I would encourage anti-Flockers and anti-authority individuals out here to question their motives and make sure that their voices and actions are best aligned with protecting vulnerable individuals (this also includes trafficked illegal immigrants).
Seems like many folks here might be more concerned with preventing hypothetical/theoretical harm, instead of REAL harm (violent crime, trafficking, vehicle theft)
This implies that the harm caused by this broad surveillance technology is "hypothetical/theoretical", when there is long history in this country's government using private companies to launder otherwise illegal surveillance of political activists[1].
And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].
> Flock would have detected, but maybe not prevented, two of these cases
I'm glad you acknowledge this, because it highlights what has irritated me about the discussion of crime in the last ~6 years. People seem to expect that crime can be prevented. Our criminal justice system and system of civil rights can only intervene after the crime has occurred, which means it won't prevent anything. Maybe I've misread you personally, and I don't mean to put it all on you, but I think people with your position tend to vastly overstate the deterrent factor of proposed interventions.
Further, only reacting to crime and not seeking to "punish" people before a crime has occurred is exactly how our system should work. When reasoning about crime prevention, a large number of people seem to want police to intervene preemptively. Or they want to punish offenders out of proportion to actual crimes, to prevent recidivism that hasn't happened yet. This type of thinking seems to slide pretty quickly into the "pre-crime" concept of dystopian scifi. We called that stuff dystopian for a reason.
In my opinion what we should do instead to prevent crime is to promote social cohesion, in the form of preventing income and wealth disparity, funding a strong social safety net, help for drug addicts and the mentally ill, etc. People who live happier, more stable lives will have less reason to turn to crime.
(I will also note, crime is lower everywhere in America vs. a few decades ago. Violent crime peaked in the mid 1990s. So it is in some sense a misguided endeavor completely, focusing on problems that are relatively unlikely.)
It sounds like your point is that people should be willing to give up their privacy in return for the chance of detecting (not preventing) violent crimes.
I think it's also disingenuous (or at best, completely naive) to pretend like harm from Flock and other surveillance is hypothetical/theoretical. Here are just 2 recent examples of REAL harm:
I'm glad the data is being catalogued and made available like this but the interactive map doesn't work for me at all. Seems to be missing clickable zoom controls and gestures on my trackpad only seem to be able to get it to zoom out, not in (I think maybe it's becoming entirely unresponsive when it first registers the zoom in event and dropping the rest of it). Did anyone actually bother to test this on a low end device?
More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.
It would be an interesting and potentially useful project to combine these camera locations with Maps routing -- similar to "avoid toll roads," we could "avoid surveillance cameras."
If you're in the US, stay away from Home Depot and Lowe's if you want to not be around them. It's not universal, but it's surprising how much they are often there.
I get it may have its application in theft recovery, but it also happens to have some strong potential for ICE raids for day laborers. I don't think it has much application to theft prevention as I doubt many people even know they are there.
I added one a few months ago and went to go check it, and there are 2 others almost right on top of it pointing in different directions, I guess that can't be prevented? I'm fairly certain they didn't add two more ALPRs that close to each other.
Just anecdotally looking around my city, it's noticeable that the camera's locations have a much stronger correlation with areas of high wealth rather than high crime.
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
Weird. The city I live in has cameras, but only a few at random intersections. Most of the cameras are on a university campus, home depot, Lowes, and target. Are these normal places to put flock cameras for other cities?
Haha Sudbury and Napanee are the only places in Canada to have them. They are tiny cities where nothing happens. Bored police officers imagining situations where they are needed.
Same here, but just Lowes stores. That I know of. I surveiled the two local Lowes roughly a month ago and found two cameras not mapped, which I gleefully added myself. Want to send them a snail mail complaint at some point stating they won't be getting my business until they step back from turning us into a police state.
So, our city clearly has other cameras but they are from a different vendor (and don't show up on the map). I wonder how good/bad the other players in the industry are. Flock gets the press, is that just letting someone worse quietly fill in the gaps?
None in my area. Time to disperse. Get out of major cities like the pandemic promised. Fill in this great country we live in. Proliferate the governments surveillance for them.
Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.
DeFlock is powered by crowdsourced data from the OpenStreetMap community. The map is incomplete! New locations are always being added. Know of a missing ALPR? Contribute to the map: https://deflock.org/report/id
A more generous term is civil disobedience. I think the argument is the original theft was using tax payers dollars on fancy tracking devices in the first place.
You might wish to do some cursory research before arguing further. For example, as a starting point, the Wikipedia page on civil disobedience has an entire section labeled "Action" listing counterexamples.
> Civil disobedience is the active and nonviolent refusal to obey certain government laws, demands, or commands to achieve social change or protest injustice
Most associated with MLK Jr, who explicitly advocated breaking the law
Civil means nonviolent. There were laws against blacks sitting at certain counters in some areas of the US in the past. Those laws were broken without violence. That's civil disobedience.
Please at least try to understand what you're talking about; you're embarrassing yourself.
I don't remember him calling Linus a terrorist, though there were others that associated anything with a copyleft licence to be the loony left (or the commie left).
He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.
He said Linux is a cancer, which was a stupid thing to say, but not the same as calling Linus a cancer. I say plenty of bad things about software that I would not say about the people who create it. I think Next.js is awful to use but that doesn't mean I think everyone at Vercel is an awful person, for example.
But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood. Sure, there's a security risk but there's also a risk of not catching criminals due to lack of evidence. Tons of crimes aren't prosecuted due to the lack of evidence.
A security risk doesn't impact average people, and it can be handled more easily.
I've yet to see an amount of property crime that can get the cops to lift a finger. I've seen them ignore a low-six-figures-stolen string of after-hours break-ins at businesses, captured at multiple location on camera with clear shots of the vehicle, legible plates, and faces of the perps. Just straight-up gave the impression they thought anyone believing they might want to look into it was a moron. And no, given where this happened it wasn't because of that "prosecutors won't charge anyway" thing people complain about some places (it's led me to wonder how much of that is cops just looking to pass the blame on cases they had no intention of investigating anyway).
On the "coordinated efforts" front, some anecdata:
Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.
How do we make this site mainstream? The public would really start to push back if they could so viscerally experience that they are being surveilled multiple times per day.
Flock AI cameras run off small solar panels. Having run my own computer systems off small solar panels I know that even a minor shadow or a bit of bird poop on the panel can decrease the output enough the computer eventually cannot run and shuts down. I bet Flock cameras have the same response to a bit of bird poop like substance or shadow.
Could be wrong but I don't think Flock makes speed trap or red light cameras. These are license plate readers that conduct constant surveillance of everyone at all times, whether or not you've broken any traffic laws.
plate reading allows police to identify known and unknown suspects. For known suspects (e.g. police have PC, suspect fled), plate reader can help find the suspect without high speed pursuit. For unknown suspect (e.g. citizen report of street racing), plate readers can develop a suspect pool and narrow down candidate suspects for further investigation.
plate reading help police track down suspects without pursuit. video recording in general help police collect evidence necessary to convict reckless driving.
solving crime and convicting criminals has first and n-order effects. For one, a few criminals commit most crimes, so locking people up reduces many crimes. Secondly, convictions are a deterrent.
Police just aren't doing their job in the US, who even knows what they're doing at this point. Basically no country had the post-covid driver issue as much as America. Some states basically halved fines lol, make them do their jobs.
Seriously. People run reds in front of cops and they do nothing. I was tboned and the person that hit me had no license or anything to identify and ran a red and still was let go without anything.
This is what happens to your country when you don't really care about public services (in many cases they're looked down upon, just look at teachers, federal workers but also police). There's difficulty recruiting and retaining police officers in the US (i'd imagine anywhere but especially the US) because it's not seen as a good job. I'm not a huge believer in IQ but intelligent and capable people just can't be convinced to go into this line of work unless they truly care about their community (very rare). Just way more fun to go to the big city and work in an office with an AC.
I'm sure there's a million other reasons why people don't want this job, but this reflects in how harsh you can be on (new) agents.
that is a big part of it. Directly, people don't give the police enough respect, and indirectly, they don't encourage politicians to develop policy to support the police.
The amount of times I've seen cops just sitting in their cars playing on their phones or loitering around chatting and ignoring everything around them is ridiculously high.
> At the same time, the public demands more oversight and constraints on police , which reduces their ability to enforce the law
Don't make excuses for them. If you're legally allowed to kill people on purpose, you (should) get oversight and tight constraints. We don't because of a lot of reasons, but we should
They get paid six figure salaries for not actually doing a whole lot, they can manage.
To what extent? Do you want infinite oversight and little-to-no crimes convicted? What are your expectations on law and order vs criminality? do you believe people naturally police themselves?
These cameras aren't even enforcement, just surveillance.
I think we all know even with the best technology in the world the police aren't gonna get off their lazy asses if your car gets stolen. This is just a way to burn money.
So they're useless for crimes not involving a reported license plate? Sounds like a pretty worthless marginal gain. The Chinese have done it better since their mass surveillance apparatus isn't contingent on reported license plates, or even the involvement of a vehicle. Start a fight on the street and they'll find you. Is America really this incompetent that they can't match a 10+ year old system?
So what you're saying is that I can report your[1] car as being associated with a crime, and the police will show up wherever you and/or your car is and treat you like a criminal?
Flock cameras aren't enforcing anything. They collect your license plate and distinguishing details of your car. It's just car X with plate Y detected at location Z at time T.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
It's clearly true there have been abuses as a result of this technology. And its also clearly true criminals have been caught as a result of the cams, that otherwise would not have been.
If you believe the costs of the the abuses, and potential abuses, exceed the benefit, then at least be honest about the trade-off, because there are real benefits.
Personally, I believe the costs, on net, are worth the benefits. And in so far as the costs can be further reduced, without loosing most benefits, then great. This is not right or wrong. It's just a question of values, and how you weight the costs vs benefits.
My question to you is: how are you assessing the costs? Do you know how many crimes have been stopped as a result of these cams? Do you know the extent to which our privacy is being lost and our data is being used against us or others?
I take into account publicly available information (news articles), factor in personal anecdotes, and reason about human nature and incentives. I know the extent of reported abuses, and I do my best to extrapolate. It's not perfect, but such is life.
To be clear, even if we all agreed on the data, I still would not expect everyone to take the same position. There are subjective differences in values.
Flock has put out a report claiming 10% crime in the US is solved using their technology. There are of course counter argument, that claim this is not valid.
This data shouldn't even be collected in the first place, let alone consolidated into a national network that any police officer can decide to spy on me through.
Now you have turn by turn navigation around ALPRs on your phone.
Edit: link https://github.com/pickpj/Big-B-Router - I tend to find ALPRs that are missing in the OSM data, so keep on updating OSM data.
fixed that for you. :-/
That's an interesting idea...
I was hoping for an online game, maybe Escape From Flockopolis.
Driving sim (using Google street view) where you try to avoid the Flock.
Presumably that software can then be used to upsell additional cameras because with an increased density your capabilities start to approximate real-time live position tracking instead of just getting approximate locations of hot plates.
The difference is these typically don't zap that data up to a central database that any agency in the country can access, the way Flock does if only because the security people at Flock are a joke.
In my city, the plate reader cop cars have 4 smallish boxes, each mounted above a quarter panel. At most about 1/20 of the police cars for my local PD has these installed.
It’s more likely that private sector cars have them installed because car repo companies will pay bounties for license plate hits on a car they have an active repo contract for.
I drove out to investigate, ended up adding two more to the site.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47254734
"Don't do anything bad and nothing will happen" is frankly asinine to me, personally. That same logic could extend to stop-and-frisk or random door-to-door visits to check for citizenship.
It can be. FLOCK data was used to put Bryan Kohberger at the scene along with other people's security camera's. Cops regularly use FLOCK camera's to get hits for criminals that have warrants for violent crime.
I can see why people are ok with them when they're used to get criminals off the streets. However, I've seen multiple times where cops initiate a felony stop (where people are pulled out at gunpoint and detained) against a car they got a hit on - only to find out the person they really wanted wasn't driving or even in the car at all.
What's interesting is businesses and houses have so many cameras nowadays that the first thing cops do when they get to the scene of a violent crime is canvas the area for camera's. So yeah, you can avoid FLOCK, but there are most likely hundreds of other camera's that will capture you driving through any given area.
If you look at the map, there are zero flock cameras reported in that region.
None in Moscow Idaho where the murder happened, none in Pullman where he lived, and none showed between the locations.
So I'm not overly surprised by this.
At what point do we accept that all systems are flawed? There could be many variables as to why the perp wasn't in the car. Maybe the perp stole the car. Maybe the perp borrowed the car. Maybe these systems do not work well in fog etc etc. I don't know how we're supposed to advance technology that makes us safer without getting into these muky situations from time to time.
Considering the potential and demonstrated abuse there must be more robust guardrails than currently exist. The required level of safety is more like “nuclear launch codes” or “commercial airliner”, not “local used car lot landing page”.
This juice ain’t worth the squeeze.
https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/law-justice/wa-cit...
If a human followed me around in public recording me, went through every frame and highlighted my face, my car, my license plate, dents and scratches that identify my car, where I'm going, what I'm doing, cross referencing that to other public information to build a dossier, I would have a solid case of harassment against that person. That's some stalker shit.
See, for example, https://lawfilesext.leg.wa.gov/biennium/2025-26/Pdf/Bills/Ho... which would carve out:
An agency may access, operate, or use an automated license plate reader system and its associated data only for the following authorized purposes: (a) Any law enforcement agency may use an automated license plate reader system for the purpose of comparing captured automated license plate reader data with: (i) Data on any of the following watch lists maintained by either a federal or Washington state agency: The department of licensing, the state criminal justice information system, the federal bureau of investigation kidnappings and missing persons list, and the Washington missing persons list; or (ii) License plate numbers that have been manually entered into a state or local automated license plate reader system database, upon an officer's determination that the license plate numbers are relevant and material to an investigation of a vehicle that is: (A) Stolen; (B) Associated with a missing or endangered person; (C) Registered to an individual for whom there is an outstanding felony warrant; or (D) Related to or involved in a felony. 33 (b) Any parking enforcement agency may use an automated license plate reader system for the following purposes: (i) Enforcing time restrictions on the use of parking spaces; or (ii) Identifying vehicles on a watch list for impoundment or immobilization under a local ordinance enacted under RCW 46.55.240, provided the list includes only license plates of vehicles subject to that ordinance. (c) An automated license plate reader system may be used as a component of photo toll systems authorized by RCW 47.56.795 or 47.46.105 (d) Any transportation agency may use an automated license plate reader system for the following purposes: (i) Providing real-time traffic information to the public, traffic modeling, and traffic studies such as determining construction delays and route use; and (ii) Enforcing commercial vehicle systems at Washington state patrol enforcement sites and weigh stations.
That said, the only thing that really stops them from being massive dragnets of everybody always would essentially be how they're configured, which obviously can change. I think we've seen enough misuse of systems and tools throughout history that it's worthwhile to be mindful of creating easily misused systems and tools.
https://every-door.app/
https://github.com/Zverik/every_door
Their stated reason is: "Along with the cameras being used to reduce crime, the sheriff’s office said they may also be used for public safety concerns, including AMBER Alerts and Silver Alerts."
The cameras are good when we're all on the happy path, but as soon as a bad actor gets involved, all of that surveillance won't look so great. History shows that the odds of that happening are decidedly non-zero.
EDIT: Searching for some info on the grant referenced in the article, it appears that a county must match 20% of the grant amount; one example is [1]. I'm sure this looks like a great deal to county officials.
[0] https://www.ketk.com/news/crime-public-safety/new-traffic-ca...
[1] https://www.beltontexas.gov/news_detail_T11_R1277.php
I think reducing crime and road safety is an excuse.
There are true innovators in the traffic camera space but i think counties often choose vendors who give them best ROI.
Seat belt detection, phone detection, lane violations etc. at the application layer.
I can talk about Sensysgatso, where I used to work. They have quite some tech-forward platform.
Whether or not that is true, I suspect it is, the best way to avoid fines for breaking traffic regulations is to not break traffic regulations. They can't make anything from you that way if you do.
A Sedgwick, Kansas, police chief used Flock Safety license plate readers to track his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend’s vehicles 228 times over four-plus months and used his police vehicle to follow them out of town, according to a city official and a report released this week by the agency that oversees police certifications.
If you want an absolute torrent of abuse search for cops running the IDs of their exes. That's why it's dead certain that Flock cameras will be routinely abused.
Doesn’t seem like the technology itself is the core issue here to me.
Stop being obtuse.
Hell, everything after Room 641A is a no-brainer.
Hot take: AMBER alert is a way to keep the public paranoid about child abduction by strangers, an evil but extremely rare act, and turn their paranoia into support for law enforcement. It may not be the intended purposes, but the (real) purpose of a system is what it does.
It is no surprise that Flock, like other parties pushing for the erosion of privacy and personal freedom, are following the same playbook. Don't you want your kid (or your doggo) to get home safe? If you don't let us spy on you your literally supporting child abductors. Checkmate libertarians.
The reality of AMBER alert is they overwhelmingly come from custody dispute cases where the child's safety is not in jeopardy, because they tend to be the only kind of cases where they know enough about the "abductor" to issue an alert that is not just "look for a man driving a white van." The reality of child abuse is you should be infinitely more worried about authority figures dealing with the child — parents, relatives, teachers, pastors, coaches and yes, the police — than strangers driving unmarked white vans.
I agree with the rest of what you wrote but the quote is an overly cynical tired cliche when applied in a blanket manner. There are specific situations involving bad faith actors where it is directly relevant, and there are also times where it can be a useful observation about the impact of perverse incentives that build on top of unintended consequences.
But the way you're using it there it's no better than other politically charged nonsensical slogans.
I thought they were mostly custody style kidnappings anyway.
Because the scope of information they gather is much larger than most law enforcement technologies.
> Law enforcement needs reform for sure
And the current protections are woefully inadequate.
Doesn't all the surveillance concern go away if we just remove license plates from cars? Our plates identify us nearly perfectly.
It actually annoys me that people focus purely on the ALPRs when the other cameras are arguably much worse.
I have two cameras in my small town, but I can avoid them, so I now go out of my way to cross town.
I would encourage anti-Flockers and anti-authority individuals out here to question their motives and make sure that their voices and actions are best aligned with protecting vulnerable individuals (this also includes trafficked illegal immigrants).
Seems like many folks here might be more concerned with preventing hypothetical/theoretical harm, instead of REAL harm (violent crime, trafficking, vehicle theft)
And even if you ignore the historical parallels, there are already cases of: officers using Flock systems to stalk dating partners[2][3], immigration enforcement using Flock data to track targets[4], and ICE/CBP bypassing the systems in place that let local jurisdictions choose not to share with federal agencies[5].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_Goals_Foundation
[2]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/menasha...
[3]: https://www.jsonline.com/story/news/crime/2026/02/24/mpd-off...
[4]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
[5]: https://jsis.washington.edu/humanrights/2025/10/21/leaving-t...
I'm glad you acknowledge this, because it highlights what has irritated me about the discussion of crime in the last ~6 years. People seem to expect that crime can be prevented. Our criminal justice system and system of civil rights can only intervene after the crime has occurred, which means it won't prevent anything. Maybe I've misread you personally, and I don't mean to put it all on you, but I think people with your position tend to vastly overstate the deterrent factor of proposed interventions.
Further, only reacting to crime and not seeking to "punish" people before a crime has occurred is exactly how our system should work. When reasoning about crime prevention, a large number of people seem to want police to intervene preemptively. Or they want to punish offenders out of proportion to actual crimes, to prevent recidivism that hasn't happened yet. This type of thinking seems to slide pretty quickly into the "pre-crime" concept of dystopian scifi. We called that stuff dystopian for a reason.
In my opinion what we should do instead to prevent crime is to promote social cohesion, in the form of preventing income and wealth disparity, funding a strong social safety net, help for drug addicts and the mentally ill, etc. People who live happier, more stable lives will have less reason to turn to crime.
(I will also note, crime is lower everywhere in America vs. a few decades ago. Violent crime peaked in the mid 1990s. So it is in some sense a misguided endeavor completely, focusing on problems that are relatively unlikely.)
I think it's also disingenuous (or at best, completely naive) to pretend like harm from Flock and other surveillance is hypothetical/theoretical. Here are just 2 recent examples of REAL harm:
https://www.postcrescent.com/story/news/crime/2026/01/12/men...
https://kenoshacountyeye.com/2025/12/12/deputy-on-leave-accu...
You can guarantee that there are many more that haven't been caught.
> left-leaning, anti-police
As if there is any correlation, or crimes don't occur in right-leaning locales.
> hypothetical/theoretical harm
Freedom is very real, and includes security from the state. The latter risks are hardly theoretical in history and very present today.
More generally, if you're a webdev with a high end workstation it's really important to occasionally spin up a single core VM with less than 4 GB RAM, open a youtube video, and then check how well your page works in a second simultaneously visible window.
I get it may have its application in theft recovery, but it also happens to have some strong potential for ICE raids for day laborers. I don't think it has much application to theft prevention as I doubt many people even know they are there.
And, where I am, you're more likely to have a gun if you're poor, because there's more exposure to crime, resulting in a much more realistic understanding that the police won't save you in an emergency.
https://oaklandcounty115.com/2026/03/03/clarkston-man-accuse...
https://deflock.org/identify
They might also be competent at securing access to the data, removing an obvious objection to continued relationships with Flock.
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
https://app.copdb.org is a similar project for mapping police & the violence they commit. Mostly in Utah but recently opened up to include ICE agents, which is talked about on their blog: https://copdb.org/articles/mapping-the-tentacles-of-state-vi...
Caveat: it does not seem to update camera statuses after initial reporting. I see several cameras that were removed long ago, or have been repositioned, but their old statuses remain.
Most associated with MLK Jr, who explicitly advocated breaking the law
Please at least try to understand what you're talking about; you're embarrassing yourself.
He certainly referred to both him and Linux as cancers though, that I do remember. He later changed his mind on that, and IIRC may even have publicly apologised for those statements.
But I'd like cameras in my neighborhood. Sure, there's a security risk but there's also a risk of not catching criminals due to lack of evidence. Tons of crimes aren't prosecuted due to the lack of evidence.
A security risk doesn't impact average people, and it can be handled more easily.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Are there any coordinated efforts for widespread scrubbing or removal of these parasitic devices?
Three separate posts on Craigslist in the Community section about Flock Cameras, trying to increase local awareness. Posted to two different cities, various posting iterations (e.g. with links / without, pics / no pics, etc.). All appeared to post fine when entered, but never saw the light of day and were marked as removed within a few minutes.
Any other subject: posts fine.
Try it yourself and see what you get.
How do these cameras prevent those crimes?
I'm sure there's a million other reasons why people don't want this job, but this reflects in how harsh you can be on (new) agents.
Don't make excuses for them. If you're legally allowed to kill people on purpose, you (should) get oversight and tight constraints. We don't because of a lot of reasons, but we should
They get paid six figure salaries for not actually doing a whole lot, they can manage.
I think we all know even with the best technology in the world the police aren't gonna get off their lazy asses if your car gets stolen. This is just a way to burn money.
> License plate is reported to police associated with a crime.
> Cop looks up plate number
> Flock Camera shows general status and location of that license plate.
> Cops find the car involved with the crime, preventing further criminality.
I love this for you!
[1] the literal you, as well as the figurative
(I may, in fact, be an idiot. Help me out here.)
I think they made a movie about that.
Notably, they are not used for speed detection or 'good driving' detection.
You might think that having a constantly-present, objective, impartial camera enforcing a law is better than a sometimes-present, subjective, often not impartial beat cop doing that. But that's not what Flock does. Flock just turns that 'sometimes-present' beat cop into an 'always-present' beat cop, without addressing any of the other beat cop problems.
If you believe the costs of the the abuses, and potential abuses, exceed the benefit, then at least be honest about the trade-off, because there are real benefits.
Personally, I believe the costs, on net, are worth the benefits. And in so far as the costs can be further reduced, without loosing most benefits, then great. This is not right or wrong. It's just a question of values, and how you weight the costs vs benefits.
Don't down-vote this all at once.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
To be clear, even if we all agreed on the data, I still would not expect everyone to take the same position. There are subjective differences in values.
https://www.flocksafety.com/customers/how-many-crimes-do-aut...