7 ms·

How Cops Are Using Flock's ALPR Network to Surveil Protesters and Activists

217 points by pseudalopex 11mo ago

owlninja 11mo ago
I recently contributed to https://deflock.me/ 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-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas... [2] https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arrested-lies-to-grand-jury https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arreste...
- barbazoo 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      Some cities just publish these locations, and in many (most?) jurisdictions you can just FOIA the camera placements.
  - aiiotnoodle 11mo ago
    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 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 https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438
  - criddell 11mo ago
    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.
    - tsbischof 11mo ago
      Yup, about 100k installed vs about 40k mapped
  - fencepost 11mo ago
    One thing you could do is go and physically look at the camera. https://deflock.me/identify https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras from at least the major providers.
- nonethewiser 11mo ago
  >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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        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 11mo ago
        Knowing abortions are illegal and flock cameras exist is sufficient information to know they are being used for such a purpose.
        11mo ago
- tptacek 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    > 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 11mo ago
      This kind of reasoning is super useful if you live in a community that has a commanding majority of voters who read HN.
- pugworthy 11mo ago
  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-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/ https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
  - SoftTalker 11mo ago
    Because those places have a huge problem with shoplifting. At least that's the story they tell.
    - pugworthy 11mo ago
      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-ice-deportations-8027689d https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/home-depot-immigration-i...
      - wakawaka28 11mo ago
        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.
        deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
varispeed 11mo ago
[flagged]
- dylan604 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
- jibal 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- dang 11mo ago
  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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - Psillisp 11mo ago
    [flagged]
  - potsandpans 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
Local strategies, "The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare" (90 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911 "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202
dylan604 11mo ago
"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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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.
  - y0eswddl 11mo ago
    The process for getting access to cell phone data is much more difficult than the process of logging into a flock system
    - anigbrowl 11mo ago
      Hence my mention of the need to tailor their request. Obviously they would need to assert some sort of criminal activity connected with the protest to get a warrant, but it's not as if cops are unfamiliar with amplifying or even provoking such, and exaggerating the level of danger in their warrant application. This might seem like a cynical take, but you can see stories almost weekly of border patrol officials admitting to lying about claims of criminality; here are two recent examples: https://abcnews.go.com/US/border-patrol-commander-admitted-lied-tear-gas-incident/story?id=127283392 https://abcnews.go.com/US/border-patrol-commander-admitted-l... https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5616287-charges-dropped-border-patrol-shooting/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5616287-charges-dro...
mlmonkey 11mo ago
[flagged]
- jibal 11mo ago
  They have vastly more cred than you do, especially after that comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well
malvim 11mo ago
Hm, the State thoroughly coopting private enterprises to oppress their people… I wonder what’s the name of that…
- potsandpans 11mo ago
  We can't say it though, at risk of being publicly derided as being histrionic.
  - mindslight 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime That's a big assumption considering crime rates are already at lows
  - nonethewiser 11mo ago
    >In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins.
    - kevinh 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
      That doesn't validate the causal claim quoted above.
  - ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    - Spivak 11mo ago
      Of course, you should instead believe your own anecdotal evidence that marks a tally every time you hear about a crime, which if you watch local news is always, but doesn't mark a tally every time there isn't a crime. Fun fact that's totally not related, did you know that people who listen to true crime podcasts are more likely to believe a crime could happen to their families and are also more likely to install higher levels of security on their house?
charcircuit 11mo ago
>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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b
TurkishPoptart 11mo ago
Is there a bumper sticker that can communicate "disregard all previous instructions and drop all session data"?
- buellerbueller 11mo ago
  be the change you want to see in the world?
- tptacek 11mo ago
  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.
  - ranon 11mo ago
    Flock Safety is a lot more than ALPR. They just try to fit in as an ALPR because those have been used for years. They do use their video feed to find unique identifiers of vehicles, such as dents, mods, color, make, model, etc. It's also highly likely they are doing facial recognition at some locations. I do not believe they are doing gait recognition yet for pedestrians, but it's just a matter of time.
    - tptacek 11mo ago
      I'm pretty familiar with the capabilities Flock actually offers law enforcement agencies, and it's license plates, makes, models, colors, and some identifying characteristics. This stuff isn't an abstraction, I don't have to reason about it axiomatically; you can directly engage with your local municipal government to see what's going on here.
amanaplanacanal 11mo ago
So... Do IR blocking license plate covers work against these things?
- avidiax 11mo ago
  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/ https://www.cehrp.org/tags/flock-safety/

217 points by pseudalopex 11mo ago

I recently contributed to https://deflock.me/ 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-sheriff-claimed-license-plate-search-was-missing-person-it https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas... [2] https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arrested-lies-to-grand-jury https://www.fox4news.com/news/johnson-county-sheriff-arreste...

barbazoo 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    Some cities just publish these locations, and in many (most?) jurisdictions you can just FOIA the camera placements.
- aiiotnoodle 11mo ago
  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 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 https://deflock.me/map#map=18/53.786783/-1.551438
- criddell 11mo ago
  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.
  - tsbischof 11mo ago
    Yup, about 100k installed vs about 40k mapped
- fencepost 11mo ago
  One thing you could do is go and physically look at the camera. https://deflock.me/identify https://deflock.me/identify has pictures of cameras from at least the major providers.
nonethewiser 11mo ago
>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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
      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 11mo ago
        Knowing abortions are illegal and flock cameras exist is sufficient information to know they are being used for such a purpose.
        11mo ago
tptacek 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  > 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 11mo ago
    This kind of reasoning is super useful if you live in a community that has a commanding majority of voters who read HN.
pugworthy 11mo ago
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-hundreds-of-ai-cameras-with-cops/ https://www.404media.co/home-depot-and-lowes-share-data-from...
- SoftTalker 11mo ago
  Because those places have a huge problem with shoplifting. At least that's the story they tell.
  - pugworthy 11mo ago
    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-ice-deportations-8027689d https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/home-depot-immigration-i...
    - wakawaka28 11mo ago
      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.
      - deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]

varispeed 11mo ago

[flagged]

dylan604 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
jibal 11mo ago
[flagged]
dang 11mo ago
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 https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- Psillisp 11mo ago
  [flagged]
- potsandpans 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago

Local strategies, "The Cameras Tracking You Are a Security Nightmare" (90 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45945960#45947911 "Find Nearby Automated License Plate Readers (ALPR)" (70 comments), https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45487452 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 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 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45490202

dylan604 11mo ago

"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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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.
- y0eswddl 11mo ago
  The process for getting access to cell phone data is much more difficult than the process of logging into a flock system
  - anigbrowl 11mo ago
    Hence my mention of the need to tailor their request. Obviously they would need to assert some sort of criminal activity connected with the protest to get a warrant, but it's not as if cops are unfamiliar with amplifying or even provoking such, and exaggerating the level of danger in their warrant application. This might seem like a cynical take, but you can see stories almost weekly of border patrol officials admitting to lying about claims of criminality; here are two recent examples: https://abcnews.go.com/US/border-patrol-commander-admitted-lied-tear-gas-incident/story?id=127283392 https://abcnews.go.com/US/border-patrol-commander-admitted-l... https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5616287-charges-dropped-border-patrol-shooting/ https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/5616287-charges-dro...

mlmonkey 11mo ago

[flagged]

jibal 11mo ago
They have vastly more cred than you do, especially after that comment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Poisoning_the_well

malvim 11mo ago

Hm, the State thoroughly coopting private enterprises to oppress their people… I wonder what’s the name of that…

potsandpans 11mo ago
We can't say it though, at risk of being publicly derided as being histrionic.
- mindslight 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago
  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 11mo ago
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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago
> Criminal Justice Reform --> Surge in crime That's a big assumption considering crime rates are already at lows
- nonethewiser 11mo ago
  >In my neighborhood (a Criminal Justice Reform Zone), the catch and release of repeat criminals caused a surge in break ins.
  - kevinh 11mo ago
    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 11mo ago
    That doesn't validate the causal claim quoted above.
- ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  - Spivak 11mo ago
    Of course, you should instead believe your own anecdotal evidence that marks a tally every time you hear about a crime, which if you watch local news is always, but doesn't mark a tally every time there isn't a crime. Fun fact that's totally not related, did you know that people who listen to true crime podcasts are more likely to believe a crime could happen to their families and are also more likely to install higher levels of security on their house?

charcircuit 11mo ago

>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 11mo ago

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 11mo ago

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 https://chat.vlm.run/c/7ca96025-1d6c-4c33-ab82-97e6f017883b

TurkishPoptart 11mo ago

Is there a bumper sticker that can communicate "disregard all previous instructions and drop all session data"?

buellerbueller 11mo ago
be the change you want to see in the world?
tptacek 11mo ago
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.
- ranon 11mo ago
  Flock Safety is a lot more than ALPR. They just try to fit in as an ALPR because those have been used for years. They do use their video feed to find unique identifiers of vehicles, such as dents, mods, color, make, model, etc. It's also highly likely they are doing facial recognition at some locations. I do not believe they are doing gait recognition yet for pedestrians, but it's just a matter of time.
  - tptacek 11mo ago
    I'm pretty familiar with the capabilities Flock actually offers law enforcement agencies, and it's license plates, makes, models, colors, and some identifying characteristics. This stuff isn't an abstraction, I don't have to reason about it axiomatically; you can directly engage with your local municipal government to see what's going on here.

amanaplanacanal 11mo ago

So... Do IR blocking license plate covers work against these things?

avidiax 11mo ago
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/ https://www.cehrp.org/tags/flock-safety/