[HN Gopher] How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil P...
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How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and
Activists
Author : pseudalopex
Score : 184 points
Date : 2025-11-21 17:20 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.eff.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.eff.org)
| owlninja wrote:
| I recently contributed to https://deflock.me/
|
| We had a local story where the gist was the police said they
| searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was
| actually more focused on a possible abortion. [1] "Unrelated"
| this same Sheriff was later charged with sexual harassment,
| perjury, and retaliation against a witness [2]. These are the
| types that are able to easily track you if they wanted to.
|
| [1] https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-
| texas...
|
| [2] https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-
| arreste...
| barbazoo wrote:
| Checked out the map, there is one near me on a parking lot with
| this OSM data
|
| > camera:type fixed
|
| > direction 340
|
| > man_made surveillance
|
| > surveillance:type ALPR
|
| Which results in "Operated by: Unknown, Made by: Unknown". What
| am I supposed to do with that info I wonder. How would I find
| out if it's actually Flock or if law enforcement would actually
| have access to this particular camera.
| owlninja wrote:
| In my case the city had to publish their agreement with Flock
| and I was able to find the city council presentation showing
| exactly where they put the cameras, and many selling points
| of how great Flock is. In fact, someone else in my town had
| already marked them.
|
| Obviously, this website does nothing for us, just glance up
| at any egress or ingress to where you live (in the US) and
| note you've been tracked. Or feel free to update the node
| with better information if you have it.
| tptacek wrote:
| Some cities just publish these locations, and in many
| (most?) jurisdictions you can just FOIA the camera
| placements.
| aiiotnoodle wrote:
| This is because the metadata in OSM doesn't include the tags
| that Deflock looks for:
|
| You can see the requirements here
| https://deflock.me/report/id but the two you're looking for
| are.
|
| manufacturer operator
|
| I think they should add Siemens Sicore cameras to their known
| camera database, but they do show up on Deflock despite not
| being mentioned explicitly on the website. Here is an example
| in one of my contributions via OSM.
| https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438
| criddell wrote:
| There are probably a lot more cameras than are listed in the
| database.
|
| You could point a camera down the street you live on and
| record the license plate of every car that passes and video
| of every pedestrian for a few hundred dollars.
|
| I thought about doing this a couple of years ago when there
| were a few instances of theft going on. To get into or out of
| my neighborhood, you have to drive by my home and I wondered
| if I could capture the license plate of the thieves.
| fencepost wrote:
| One thing you could do is go and physically look at the
| camera. https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras
| from at least the major providers.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >We had a local story where the gist was the police said they
| searched ALPR for the welfare of a young woman, but it was
| actually more focused on a possible abortion.
|
| Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal. That's
| not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras necessarily
| a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's
| simply being used for its nominal purpose.
|
| So it doesnt seems like a _particularly egregious_ use of
| flock. It 's just as egregious as it normally is, which is
| pretty egregious.
| nyc_data_geek1 wrote:
| The law can be utterly egregious and an affront to morality.
| Legal behavior can thus be an utterly egregious affront to
| human decency. See: Apartheid
|
| There is no handwaving away the moral implications of these
| technologies, and who they empower to do what to whom.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Im saying its a normal, predictable use of flock. Not that
| it's OK. Many readers might not know that abortions for the
| most part aren't legal in Texas. You should expect flock to
| assist law enforcement in catching people doing something
| illegal.
| mrtesthah wrote:
| These specific abortion laws and systems of surveillance
| are new and unprecedented, as is the use of them
| together. So we should very much like to be aware of when
| they are being used.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| Knowing abortions are illegal and flock cameras exist is
| sufficient information to know they are being used for
| such a purpose.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| The amount of people you know who understand Flock can be
| counted with your right hand, and most likely can be
| counted without. This is not common knowledge.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| See sibling comment. It's not at all shown that the
| person did something illegal, in fact they did something
| quite legal, have an abortion in Washington state in a
| manner that was within the parameters of Washington's
| abortion laws.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| They don't catch people doing something illegal. They
| might record someone's car being near some place where
| maybe something illegal happened. That's not the standard
| of "reasonable doubt" required for a criminal conviction,
| and at best is (weak) circumstantial evidence.
| tptacek wrote:
| There is no distinction between circumstantial and direct
| evidence in US criminal law.
| fzeroracer wrote:
| Just to be clear you believe it is normal and predictable
| for law enforcement officers in one state to follow your
| movements in another state to see if you violated state
| law in a state where it does not apply? That kind of
| normal?
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > But given abortions are illegal in Texas, it's simply being
| used for its nominal purpose.
|
| No, it's not.
|
| The person in question was in Washington state at the time.
| Abortions are not blanket illegal in Washington. You cannot
| be prosecuted in Texas for breaking a Texas law for something
| you did in Washington (though some states are already in the
| process of trying to close that loophole, and have created
| the crime of "conspiracy to commit abortion").
|
| It's also quite likely that accessing these Washington Flock
| records violated Washington law.
| deathanatos wrote:
| > _Just to be clear, most abortions in Texas are illegal.
| That 's not necessarily a good thing. Nor are flock cameras
| necessarily a good thing. But given abortions are illegal in
| Texas, it's simply being used for its nominal purpose._
|
| (IANAL.) In the specific case cited by the parent poster,
| AFAICT looking at the facts of the case, no Texas law was
| violated, nor do the authorities involved ever allege that
| any law was violated.
|
| Nonetheless, the authorities involved in this case violated
| her privacy, including use of ALPR cameras _in other states_.
| The reasoning given is disputed, and seems to be a motte
| /bailey between "it was a missing person report" (with
| specious reasoning as to her being "missing") and
| "investigation of an abortion" that _the State themselves_
| admits they "could not statutorily charge [her]" for.
| tptacek wrote:
| The thing about this Texas abortion Flock story is: whether or
| not your muni keeps Flock, absolutely no municipality should
| have out-of-state data sharing on (arguably, none of them
| should have any data sharing on at all --- operationally,
| departments do just fine making phone calls and getting the
| data they need).
|
| This is totally configurable inside Flock. It's very easy for a
| police department to do. Sometimes they'll argue that they need
| to keep sharing open because sharing is reciprocal --- that's
| not true (in fact, you don't even need to _have_ Flock cameras
| to get access to Flock data; that 's a SKU Flock has!).
|
| We piloted Flock with open sharing (my commission got
| consultation for the police General Order for ALPRs in our
| municipality, we pushed for no sharing alongside a bunch of
| other restrictions, we got most of what we wanted but not the
| sharing stuff). When the pilot ended and the board needed a go-
| no-go on deployment, another push got made on sharing and we
| got out-of-state sharing disabled as a condition of deployment.
| Then at contract renewal, when the writing was on the wall that
| we were killing the contract+, our police department turned off
| all sharing.
|
| Even if you're not worried about stuff like reproductive health
| care (you should be), it doesn't make sense to allow
| departments that don't share your General Orders direct access
| to your telemetry.
|
| + _I wasn 't a supporter on this for complicated reasons._
| buran77 wrote:
| > arguably, none of them should
|
| Indisputably, once someone has a hammer, especially one that
| grants them this much extra power, they will go looking for
| nails. In 2025 those who still defend those "hammers" with
| the wide-eyed impression that they can somehow control them
| once they're out there are at best showing hubris, lack of
| foresight, and disregard for the history books.
|
| To be more clear, when you push for "less sharing" and
| somehow get it, you aren't actually getting what you want,
| you're just getting less of what you didn't want. It's like
| when the waiter asks you how much spit you want in your soup,
| the correct answer is to kick the waiter out not to demand a
| minimal amount.
| tptacek wrote:
| This kind of reasoning is super useful if you live in a
| community that has a commanding majority of voters who read
| HN.
| pugworthy wrote:
| In exploring my state (Oregon), I'm seeing an interesting
| pattern to where they are frequently located. Specifically, at
| home improvement store parking lots.
|
| And in most cases, the ones at home improvement stores are the
| _only_ ones in the city. Salem (the state capital) only has
| them at Lowes. Eugene is an exception with many cameras
| (including Home Depot and Lowe 's).
|
| I'd be interested in when these cameras were placed. If recent,
| I'd wonder about an ICE/immigration response.
|
| Just zooming around the map, here's a handful of citys I've
| seen...
|
| Lowe's: Albany, Salem, McMinville, Vancouver WA, Fairview,
| Eugene, Bend, Redmond, Medford
|
| Home Depot: Sherwood, Hillsboro, Beaverton, Cedar Mill
| (Beaverton), Tigard, Vancouver WA, Portland (multiple),
| Gresham, Oregon City
|
| * Edit * Ah here's an article about this:
| https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
| SoftTalker wrote:
| Because those places have a huge problem with shoplifting. At
| least that's the story they tell.
| pugworthy wrote:
| I imagine there's some truth to that. But if I was someone
| wanting to setup some ICE action, I'd probably be drooling
| at the thought of accessing that data being a central
| gathering points for day laborers looking for work.
|
| https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/home-depot-
| immigration-i...
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| As I understand it, these stores are very likely to be
| gathering points anyway. You don't need surveillance to
| tell you that. Someone could walk in posing as a
| contractor and ask where to find cheap workers too.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Montana is an interesting state. Very few cameras state wide
| (20), and all but 3 are at Lowe's and Home Depot.
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| Home improvement stores have a LOT of theft, especially in
| some cities. People try to walk out with power tools and
| expensive gear all the time.
| pugworthy wrote:
| Maybe? It would have to be a pretty big theft to go to all
| the trouble of finding the vehicle on camera, identifying
| the owner, figuring out if the thief was the owner, etc.
|
| They aren't going to do all that if it's a relatively small
| value theft. And the big value stuff is usually locked
| down.
|
| And if it's for their own protection why be part of a
| bigger network shared with law enforcement for whatever
| they (LEO) wants?
| wakawaka28 wrote:
| There is no maybe about it. These thefts are well-known
| and spur the defensive measures you're talking about. It
| goes beyond just locking things up. There are AI systems
| tracking your movement through the store, and they can
| even immobilize your shopping cart on the way out if they
| think you didn't pay. Some tools also have RFID based
| activation schemes, without which they can't be used.
|
| It is the job of the police to investigate thefts.
| Therefore it kind of makes sense why they might want to
| put up cameras in high crime areas. We just don't want
| the cameras to be abused. I don't want to be tracked and
| have the contents of my house itemized by systems like
| this. Is there a less intrusive way to prevent crime,
| perhaps by posting a security guard? I think so. But what
| does it cost, and would you rather pay for that or deal
| with the camera?
| varispeed wrote:
| [flagged]
| dylan604 wrote:
| the test for this will be the mid-terms. current polls are
| leaning towards a correction, but polls have been so badly
| wrong the past several elections that I put no faith in them
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| Yes, the "Damned if you don't" faction is polling well
| against the "Damned if you do" faction currently.
|
| Either way, we're still just making a shit sandwich and
| arguing over the condiments.
| dang wrote:
| Please don't post like this to HN. Regardless of how bad a
| situation is or you feel it is, we need you (i.e. not you
| personally, but all of us) to stick to the site guidelines.
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
| Psillisp wrote:
| Please don't use Hacker News for political or ideological
| battle. It tramples curiosity.
|
| Please don't call out the boot on your neck.
|
| You are making a scene.
|
| Tsk. Tsk.
| potsandpans wrote:
| It's always curious how and when you decide to pop into
| threads and request that people follow the rules of
| hackernews. You claim that the site and your moderation
| principles are not (or have limited) ideologically
| motivated(tions), but your enforcement (or engagement) is
| uneven and certainly along some political axis.
|
| From the rules:
|
| > Please don't complain that a submission is inappropriate.
| If a story is spam or off-topic, flag it. Don't feed
| egregious comments by replying; flag them instead. If you
| flag, please don't also comment that you did.
|
| Yet one of the top comments of most front page items is
| always a useless comment of clickbait or some pedantic
| complaint/accusation about some format of the
| title/submission.
|
| You have a hard job, it's not intended to be an indictment of
| your behavior. Just a general observation that I wonder if
| you're cognizant of.
|
| If the community needs this so badly, why is the above
| aforementioned behavior so prevent that it's become a meme of
| hackernews behavior?
| walterbell wrote:
| Local strategies, _" The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security
| Nightmare"_ (90 comments),
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911
|
| _" Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)"_ (70
| comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452
|
| Adversarial computer vision and DIY OSS $250 RPi Hailo ALPR (2M
| views), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Pp9MwZkHiMQ
|
| _" Tire Pressure Sensor IDs: Why, Where and When (2015)"_ (30
| comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
| dylan604 wrote:
| "the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect
| at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single
| person who attended the protest."
|
| No. This is simply not accurate. They collected data on every
| single car that attended, but there easily could be more people
| at the protest that rode in the same car, lyft/uber, took a bus,
| walked, or any other methods of getting there without a car.
| tptacek wrote:
| This is downvoted (it probably won't be by the time you read it
| and I shouldn't be commenting on voting) but it's true. I think
| the underlying issue EFF is writing about here is directionally
| real, but I also think it's useful to know the ground truth
| about these things.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| Fair, but let's be realistic about the fact that it's also easy
| for cops to get cellphone tower and location data if they feel
| like doing correlations. If they tailor their request to the
| date and area around a protest this would be sufficiently
| 'narrowly tailored' for many judges to just give them a
| warrant.
| tptacek wrote:
| This argument very nearly kept Flock cameras alive in my
| muni, with the logic being that ALPRs weren't doing anything
| phones weren't already doing vis a vis privacy.
| malvim wrote:
| Hm, the State thoroughly coopting private enterprises to oppress
| their people... I wonder what's the name of that...
| potsandpans wrote:
| We can't say it though, at risk of being publicly derided as
| being histrionic.
| mindslight wrote:
| As a libertarian, I'll stop calling them fascists when they
| stop calling themselves conservatives and actually adopt some
| kind of honest label for what they stand for. But that would
| require them to stand for something constructive rather than
| simping for whatever destructive looting Dear Leader has
| divined this week.
| tptacek wrote:
| These are generally _not_ private cameras; they 're operated by
| states and municipalities. There are some corner cases like
| Home Depot that matter if your area has decided not to do
| ALPRs, but in most places, police department deployment of
| ALPRs is accelerating, not receding, and the private cameras
| are kind of a sideshow.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| While I agree with your overall statement, I want to note
| that OP said private enterprise, not private cameras. Flock
| is doing more than distributing hardware here.
| astroflection wrote:
| I don't know of a name for this but I would rephrase what you
| are getting at:
|
| The state uses private entities to get around the constitution
| while those same private entities use the state to get around
| regulation.
|
| It's a sick fucking symbiosis.
| focusgroup0 wrote:
| In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch
| and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins. The
| citizens organized and funded the installation of Flock LPRs.
| Several criminals have been caught as a result, and crime is now
| down.
|
| So the impetus is twofold:
|
| - Funding provided by programs such as Operation Stonegarden and
| other grants
|
| - Activists agitate for Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in
| crime --> The People clamor for Enhanced Security Measures and
| DIY
| comrh wrote:
| > Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime
|
| That's a big assumption considering crime rates are already at
| lows
| nonethewiser wrote:
| >In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the
| catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break
| ins.
| kevinh wrote:
| But suddenly adding cameras that resulted in catching more
| people fixed the issue? Surely if the catch and release was
| the issue, that wouldn't make a difference.
| anigbrowl wrote:
| That doesn't validate the causal claim quoted above.
| nonethewiser wrote:
| There is a trend towards less personal accountability and more
| centralized prevention. Instead of properly dealing with people
| who misuse sharp knives, we are making all knives duller.
| wil421 wrote:
| The city I used to live in trialed flock cameras for car theft.
| They caught more car thefts in January of the trial year than
| the previous year's total.
| hopelite wrote:
| This is not exactly an unbiased forum to discuss this matter
| since Flock is a YC backed program, but what do you think
| will happen in short order? Maybe that car thieves will
| simply slap on fake license plates to get out of the area?
|
| What you're left with then, is nothing but the tyrannical and
| even treasonous mass surveillance program to know where you
| go and when all your life, even when you leave your tracking
| device phone behind and use a tracking device free vehicle.
| tptacek wrote:
| Nobody cares that Flock is a YC company. I'd be surprised
| if most YC batch members even realized off the top of their
| head that Flock is YC. YC companies get criticized _all the
| time_ on HN, including by people who have done YC.
| tptacek wrote:
| We started hoping that car thefts would be a pressure point
| for a lot of violent crime (which tends to be committed from
| stolen cars --- this is the Kia problem). But we caught more
| innocent drivers with stale entries on the Illinois LEADS
| hotlist than actual stolen cars. When we OK'd the system
| after its pilot, it was on the condition that we no longer
| curb cars based on stolen car reports at all --- we'd only
| curb them based on stolen _license plates_ (which have no
| innocent explanation).
|
| Maybe other states are different for this, but in
| Chicagoland, unless you don't care about disproportionately
| harming Black motorists, using Flock for stolen car
| enforcement was a flop.
| aerostable_slug wrote:
| The lesson I keep getting from your experiences is that
| LEADS needs an overhaul.
|
| It turns out other states do have flags for things like
| "extraditable warrant" vs. just failure to appear warrants
| (something mentioned in previous discussions), and perhaps
| something could be done about the LEADS system if attention
| was given to it. It seems like fixing one's data sources is
| a great approach vs. tossing the baby out with the
| bathwater -- unless of course that's the intention all
| along, as it is with many opposed to state-owned
| surveillance of this nature.
| tptacek wrote:
| When you fix LEADS, let me know, and I'll be happy to
| revisit.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| Don't improve anything until you can fix everything! No
| incremental improvements allowed!
| tptacek wrote:
| I have no idea what this has to say with anything that I
| said. Did you see me saying "no, don't fix LEADS"?
| gs17 wrote:
| > the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in
| break ins
|
| > Several criminals have been caught
|
| The actual difference here is that the second "caught" isn't
| followed by "and released". The camera didn't do it.
|
| My street has repeat offenders who come and steal from cars
| nightly. The cops know who they are and have arrested them
| multiple times, with them immediately being released AFAIK. A
| million cameras wouldn't change this.
| ahmeneeroe-v2 wrote:
| The community got together, worked on a solution, that
| solution lead to arrests. A politically savvy prosecutor
| would not easily dismiss an organized community with proven
| ability to drive results.
|
| So yes, the camera didn't do it, but it helped.
| gs17 wrote:
| > that solution lead to arrests
|
| There were already arrests. You can't have "catch and
| release" if there's no "catch".
| tencentshill wrote:
| Cameras with good software work great for that, however the
| data should NOT be freely accessible outside of the
| city/jurisdiction they surveil. That's the issue with Flock vs
| any other AI camera/database product.
| charcircuit wrote:
| >Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice
| without ending up in a database.
|
| If you speak in a public place you should expect to possibly be
| recorded. If you want to share a message with the public, you
| should cower when people receive it. If you want privacy, then
| protest somewhere private.
| altruios wrote:
| This country is so flocked...
|
| How do we come back from this?
|
| It's time to go to your city council meeting and demand they do
| not use this technology. It was time yesterday.
| visioninmyblood wrote:
| I have been using different anonimization tools to blur out my
| face and license plate at as many locations as possible to keep
| my data as private as possible. This recent tool does it in a
| single shot in a chat. I was able to blur out LPR data very
| easily with high accuracy
| https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b
| TurkishPoptart wrote:
| Is there a bumper sticker that can communicate "disregard all
| previous instructions and drop all session data"?
| buellerbueller wrote:
| be the change you want to see in the world?
| tptacek wrote:
| These cameras don't use LLMs. The "AI" we're talking about is
| machine learning models for identifying and OCR'ing license
| plates and car models.
| amanaplanacanal wrote:
| So... Do IR blocking license plate covers work against these
| things?
| avidiax wrote:
| It might work at night, but also flock can track your car based
| on non-license plate details so your car being the only one
| with an apparently black license plate is sufficiently
| identifying.
|
| https://www.cehrp.org/tags/flock-safety/
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