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alpr.watch

• 1123581321 11mo ago
  Is that map using the same data as DeFlocked? The presentation is easier for me than how DeFlocked's map groups cameras until you zoom in closely.
  • tsbischof 11mo ago
    Different datasets. deflock.me is for ALPR locations, alpr.watch shows where local government meetings are taking place
    • 1123581321 11mo ago
      alpr.watch shows camera locations as well as government meetings once you zoom in a bit—the green dots.
• ChrisbyMe 11mo ago
  Very cool, I was thinking about building a similar thing when I saw the Flock discourse, but got busy with the holidays. Any interesting technical details? Getting the actual data from govt meetings looked like it was the hardest part to me.
  • toomuchtodo 11mo ago
    Not OP, but I automate collecting public meeting data from various local agencies across the US. The below resources might be helpful. Public meeting video can be captured using yt-dlp (and if not made public, obtained with a FOIA request), archived, transcribed, etc. Sometimes there is an RSS feed, otherwise use an LLM provider as an extractor engine against the target datastore. https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-local-agencies-accountable-using-documentcloud/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-l... https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automating-your-beat-with-doccloud/ https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin... https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/ https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/ https://documentcloud.org/ https://documentcloud.org/ https://muckrock.com/ https://muckrock.com/
    • phildini 11mo ago
      I _think_ (but am not actually certain) we're monitoring more municipal agencies at CivicBand, but I know some of the folks at MuckRock and the work they're doing is absolutely critical.
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    A huge number of municipalities all share the same tech stack: Granicus/Legistar. You can pull the agendas and minutes of all their board meetings probably going back a decade. From captioning information you can Whisper-transcribe and attribute transcripts of the meetings themselves. During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff). That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler. You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
    • phildini 11mo ago
      Granicus is six providers in a trench coat it turns out. IQM2, NovusAgenda, Legistar, Granicus, PriveGov, and CivicClerk are all Granicus projects that share absolutely 0 apis that I've found, and a city having one of these operational is no guarantee they have any of the others. Legistar and CivicClerk have actual APIs, which is nice, although it's extremely easy for the City Clerk's staff to trip and make the Legistar API unusable. My experiments with using LLMs to write crawlers for these has been extremely mixed; it's good at getting first page of data and less good at following weird pagination trails or follow-on requests. All of this led me to build CivicBand (which tracks all the municipalities I can get my hands on) and CivicObserver (which is generalized full-text search alerting for municipalities via email, mastodon, bluesky, and slack webhook)
      • tptacek 11mo ago
        Yeah, don't get me wrong, they all suck ass, but it's good to know there's one common set of things to scrape to get you lots and lots of cities. Those both sound like very cool projects!
        • phildini 11mo ago
• renewiltord 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • therobots927 11mo ago
    [flagged]
    • tt24 11mo ago
      I don’t see it as ragebait, I think the parent comment provides a valuable counter narrative to the typical HN talking points
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • immibis 11mo ago
        How do you see it having value? Merely being a counter-narrative to some other narrative is not valuable in itself, otherwise all sorts of nonsense would be valuable. Proof that counter-narratives are not automatically valuable: "the moon is made of blue cheese" and "the moon is made of green cheese" provide worthless counter-narratives to each other.
        • tt24 11mo ago
          I think the comment you replied to explains it well enough and I don’t feel the need to repeat myself. I will edit my comment as well since you edited yours instead of responding. I don’t think the GP’s comment is the equivalent of saying that the moon is made of cheese.
          • therobots927 11mo ago
            The original parent comment (now flagged) essentially said: only people who reproduce have any right to have any say in how society operates. Especially when it comes to mass surveillance. Which is patently absurd on its face. Much like saying the moon is made of cheese. Edit: I’m done pretending like regressive ideas like removing voting rights from entire segments of the population are points for valid discussion.
• snow_mac 11mo ago
  How do you get access get all the local government meetings? Do you have a crawler that looks up every city in the country then visits each website and pull down the info? A public listing site?
  • nyjah 11mo ago
    There isn’t any sort of standard for recording public meetings. I’ve seen everything mic less live streams with obstructed cameras to well curated flawless back and forth with great audio and transcripts. Meeting to meeting it can vary.
  • whstl 11mo ago
    This video that was posted here yesterday shows some details: https://youtu.be/W420BOqga_s?t=93 https://youtu.be/W420BOqga_s?t=93 Apparently there is scraping of public data + keyword matching + moderators filtering the matches. An example that he shows a bit earlier in the video comes from this page, which has an RSS feed: https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission-2 https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission... The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.
    • stronglikedan 11mo ago
      Try asking. Louis is fairly responsive.
  • c0brac0bra 11mo ago
    Perhaps something like https://www.perigon.io https://www.perigon.io?
  • phildini 11mo ago
    Hi! I've written crawlers for about a dozen municipal hosting platforms, and you can learn the bare-bones of it from our "How" page: https://civic.band/how.html https://civic.band/how.html I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
• sodality2 11mo ago
  It’s so awesome to see more people making things to fight back against ALPRs. Deflock movements are gaining traction across the country and genuinely making progress at suspension or cancellation of contracts.
  • therobots927 11mo ago
    It’s because they tap into a primal fear that the Snowden revelations didn’t. It’s more obvious and visceral to know there’s a massive network of cameras watching everyone 24/7.
    • fooqux 11mo ago
      Not just that, but because people can see the devices themselves. It's not just some guy talking about bad things in Washington DC, you can see these things on rural roads in the middle of nowhere.
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    Are they? Work I was involved in was instrumental in getting our Flock contract cancelled. Meanwhile, all the surrounding municipalities have, over the last 2 quarters, acquired more ALPR cameras. I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
    • sodality2 11mo ago
      It's definitely a push and pull; more are adopting it, but more are pushing back. The total amount is definitely still rising, though, but so is awareness. There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
      • tptacek 11mo ago
        I'm Oak Park (I helped write our ALPR General Order and the transparency reporting requirements that formed the case for killing the contract because it wasn't addressing real crime). Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours. Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were. Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
• jeffbee 11mo ago
  [flagged]
  • ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
    Just curious to understand how you think vehicles are such a critical point for decreasing crime in the US? I do agree that we have heavy crime (though HN will say it's all anecdotal and the stats show we're in a period of remarkable peace). I just don't know that greater enforcement around vehicle use will have the outsized effect that you're claiming.
    • giancarlostoro 11mo ago
      I live in a usually safe and crime free area in Florida, we had someone going car by car stealing from any car left open. My neighbor opened his door and told him he had him on camera, guy ran away. I had him on camera too but sadly no spotlight to catch a better look. I cant help but imagine that Flock deters people doing this sort of thing. I hate surveillance nanny states but criminals are getting bolder everyday it feels like. I wish there was a way to implement this sort of “surveilance” in such a way that it only impacts criminals or would be criminals and only them.
      • ahmeneeroe-v2 11mo ago
        Thanks for the response and I generally agree. Though I HATE HATE HATE the march towards the surveillance state, we need to stop crime. I was specifically asking about the GP's focus on vehicles (larger plates, unregistered vehicle enforcement) and how they thought that would reduce crime so much.
        • jeffbee 11mo ago
          All but literally every crime in my city (in the categories of, say, burglary, robbery, assault, etc) are committed by people who drive into town in stolen cars with no plates. It's totally ridiculous. If the only tactic the police knew was to pull over every Infiniti with tinted windows and no plates, the crime rate would drop to zero.
• gearhart 11mo ago
  Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones. Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
  • lenerdenator 11mo ago
    Mass deployment of CCTV and traffic cameras have a much, much longer history in the UK than in the US. Tires burning around Gatsos were a meme 20+ years ago.
  • verisimi 11mo ago
    > Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
    • try_the_bass 10mo ago
      > Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour. Given that crime rates are generally higher the more densely populated an area is (in the US, at least), I'm not sure this is true
  • deepvibrations 11mo ago
    There are quite a few new camera types rolling out in the UK, summary: 4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases. AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants. New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup). Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries. AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
• oldpersonintx2 11mo ago
  [dead]
• ck2 11mo ago
  I don't get it 99% of the population is voluntarily carrying sophisticated tracking devices with self-reporting always on even if the signal is off it catches up later with SEVERAL layers of tracking not just your phone carrier but Google+Apple stores have your location as the apps are always on in the background even phone makers have their own tracking layer sometimes we know EVERY person that went to Epstein Island from their phone tracking and they didn't even have smartphones back then Flock is just another lazy layer/databroker
  • sodality2 11mo ago
    I can opt out of that, by not carrying a phone. I cannot opt out of public surveillance. Plus at least the gap between police -> tech companies typically adds some resistance, maybe a warrant, etc. With ALPR's police have immediate access without warrants to the nationwide network. It's far more ripe for abuse, yet is exactly what the police departments want; the only chance is local governance.
  • deleted 11mo ago
    [deleted]
  • rpjt 11mo ago
    There is also no legal "reasonable expectation of privacy" for a license plate displayed on a public road.
    • klinquist 11mo ago
      because it would be ridiculous for police to be able to track every car everywhere it goes! (10 years ago) Judges require warrants to put a GPS tracker on your car. Now that Flock cameras are so ubiquitous in many cities, this gives them access to the same data without a warrant.
    • alistairSH 11mo ago
      I can reasonably expect that government agents don't follow me every time I leave the house. Legal basis for that belief or not, that's what most people expect.
• lutusp 11mo ago
  I hope the article's authors aren't taking the position that mass surveillance is a bad thing, signifying a breakdown in civilized norms ... after all, they're using the same methods to "track the trackers."
  • plorg 11mo ago
    Surely there is a difference berween "surveiling" records of institutional actors that answer to the public and dragnet tracking of individuals operating in their private capacity.
  • bonestamp2 11mo ago
    Maybe it's one of those situations where it takes a good guy using surveillance to take down a bad guy using surveillance?
  • buellerbueller 11mo ago
    The "trackers" (in the sense used by the parent post, i.e., those who govern us) are there as our representatives; it is our right to observe what they do in that role. Judging by the downvotes, there are a lot of surveillance state apologists/quislings in here! Oops, I mean "founders".
  • MSFT_Edging 11mo ago
    In the US it's not uncommon to get on the wrong side of a police officer for some personal beef, and the police officer begins to harass you using legal tools provided to them. It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women. Now we're given the same untrustworthy officers full profiles of an individuals travel history without a "need to know". If you can't see how that's dangerous, I don't know what to tell you. In the US if someone is threatening your life, you can typically shoot them if you're out of options. You usually can't do that with an officer, even if they're off duty. The rest of the cops will stand behind that thin blue line and harass you.
    • gs17 11mo ago
      > It's also not uncommon for police officers to use their tools to stalk women. And Flock specifically has already been used for this multiple times.
• ZebusJesus 11mo ago
  Im glad WA ruled that you can get flock data with a FOIA request and because of this local cities decided to disable the cameras. Currently they have put caps of the lenses of the installed cameras in WA. https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigators/judge-orders-washington-police-release-surveillance-camera-data-privacy-questions/281-c2037d52-6afb-4bf7-95ad-0eceaf477864 https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigat...
  • p_ing 11mo ago
    Unfortunately they haven't disabled them in all locales.
• travisgriggs 11mo ago
  I keep wanting to see the "Rainbows End" style experiment. The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down. One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain. Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.
  • buellerbueller 11mo ago
    Surround the homes of the politicians and billionaires, and you're onto something. Better yet, make them publicly viewable webcams.
    • deleted 11mo ago
      [deleted]
  • jkestner 11mo ago
    A friend of mine in school had a similar thought - make body cams so cheap that everyone has one. Watch the watchmen. I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
    • MangoToupe 11mo ago
      I specifically have considered this in terms of protecting workers from (otherwise private or hidden) workplace abuse.
      • elevation 11mo ago
        Two thoughts: 1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge. 2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.
• kortex 11mo ago
  Does anyone else find it painfully ironic that the one CO cop said "You can't get a breath of fresh air in or out of that place without us knowing," [0], in light of the George Floyd BLM rallying cry "I can't breathe!" and the common metaphor describing surveilance states as "suffocating"? Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world [1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk. [0] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-colorado-police-wrong-suspect/ https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-col... [1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    Fair warning that this is a deeply unpopular argument in municipal politics.
    • therobots927 11mo ago
      That depends on the municipality and who decides to show up to meetings and make a big deal about it. If enough people get freaked out by these cameras it’s gonna cause real problems for elected officials who enable them.
      • tptacek 11mo ago
        I don't agree. I watched a concerted effort, involving a good deal of public comment (which: not a very effective tool for change; you have better tools in your arsenal), and vanishingly little of it took the "there's always going to be risk, crime isn't everything" tack. "This stuff doesn't work and causes more problems than it solves" is the effective answer, not this George Floyd stuff.
      • tlb 11mo ago
        The people who show up to town council meetings lean heavily to the side of security over liberty. The most obvious reason is that it's mostly retired homeowners with busybody personality types. Privacy and liberty advocates are unlikely to win in council meetings by sheer numbers. They get some leverage with campaign donations, especially recently that Bitcoin made a lot of such people rich.
• fainpul 11mo ago
  For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it. The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".
  • jdthedisciple 11mo ago
    What, are those streams publicly accessible? I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself. Any examples for what you speak of?
    • peaseagee 11mo ago
      Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
      • maccard 11mo ago
        https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ https://trafficcamphotobooth.com/ You can even take a selfie with them!
    • gs17 11mo ago
      Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
    • fainpul 11mo ago
      I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream. Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
• Terr_ 11mo ago
  I sometimes imagine local laws/contracts with a provision like: "This system may not be operated if there is no state law that makes it a class X felony to violate someone's privacy in any of the Y conditions." In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen. This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
• phildini 11mo ago
  This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band https://civic.band and https://civic.observer https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
  • ZeWaka 11mo ago
    Seem to be getting 405s from https://civic.observer/auth/login https://civic.observer/auth/login And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html https://civic.band/why.html
    • phildini 11mo ago
      Fixed the 404s on civic.band, thanks
  • kpw94 11mo ago
    Very cool! And important for sure, thank you. Few questions: - is the stack to index those open source? - is there some standardized APIs each municipality provides, or do you go through the tedious task of building a per-municipality crawling tool? - how often do you refresh the data? Checked a city, it has meeting minutes until 6/17, but the official website has more recent minutes (up to 12/2 at least)
    • phildini 11mo ago
      Thanks for asking! - The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband https://github.com/civicband - There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need. - Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
  • tayari- 10mo ago
    This is incredible, great work and will definitely be using and sharing this! Where in the repos can we find the plugin/scraper for given municipalities to help contribute when they seem to be broken? As looks like the last meetings and agendas scraped for Cook County are from March/April of this year
• staffordrj 11mo ago
  "We have seen a flock of turkeys walk right along that fence on the outside, but I have also seen them jump high enough that they could easily land on the 4ft fence. Just 2 more feet of fence would stop all of this and give us the sense of security that we have every right to." https://alpr.watch/m/WPv1PO https://alpr.watch/m/WPv1PO first the came for the turkeys...
  • ZeWaka 11mo ago
    > We have had deer on our ring camera shown jumping over our fence into our backyard. This is very alarming.
    • heavyset_go 11mo ago
      Parks & Rec was a documentary
  • phildini 11mo ago
    Search context is legitimately hard, especially since this is unstructured text data that (ime building CivicBand) needs to be OCR'd not parsed for best results. You might be terrified the number of municipalities that are still posting PDFs of scans of printouts of their minutes, which were originally a word document, and round and round we go. Part of why I haven't guaranteed results building CivicObserver is because of how hard search context is. Maybe making this an MCP helps, but I'm not actually sure it does.
• qoez 11mo ago
  We have this in sweden and it works fine. I kinda think the US would be better off with this since it'd lead to less crime or lower costs to investigate it
  • m4ck_ 11mo ago
    asdf
    • tptacek 11mo ago
      We do not in fact have "massive police budgets". In most munis, the biggest ticket expense, by far, is schools.
      • a456463 11mo ago
        Yes. Trying to get the reduced in US, is a joke.
• stuffn 11mo ago
  This isn't said in bad faith but there is a few things that seem to be unanswered here besides surveillance is bad. 1. You have no expectation of privacy in public. 2. People carry surveillance devices in their pocket. It is somehow simultaneously bad that the government uses public surveillance, but completely fine the public does. I don't think it's acceptable these target "flock". It's completely useless doesn't solve the greater problem. The greater problem in my eyes is: 1. I can't move around my own neighborhood without being recorded by 200 personal cameras whose data is uploaded an analyzed by various security companies. 2. I can't go to someone's house without their internal cameras recorded my every move and word. 3. I can't go outside without some subset of morons, that seem to always exist, bringing out their pocket government tracking device to record everyones face, movement, location, and action. 4. I can't say or do anything in public without risking some social justice warrior recording me, cutting it up, and using it to destroy me. The greater problem is the proliferation of surveillance devices in every day life. Flock is such a small player in the grand scheme of this. These websites are simply art pieces and do nothing to solve the actual, pervasive, problem we face. So do we just stop at Flock and raise the Mission Accomplished banner? Or do we forget this nonsense and target the real problem.
  • caconym_ 11mo ago
    Private entities surveil you to make money off you or protect their property. Law enforcement surveils you to arrest you and charge you with crimes. These are not the same, and that's why some people care more about surveillance by law enforcement. As an example, see the recent case of the woman who was arrested simply for driving through a town at the same time as a robbery occurred. That sort of thing is why people care. If the data collection is performed by a private entity and then sold to the government, that is government surveillance. I agree that this is more widespread than Flock and other big names. However, Flock and its ilk currently stand to do far more damage in practice. They offer integrated turnkey solutions that are available to practically any law enforcement, from shithead chud officers in tiny shithole towns to the NYPD and all its grand history of institutionalized misconduct, and we are already seeing the effects of that. See, also, the recent case of a teenager who was arrested because a Flock camera or similar thought a Doritos bag in his pocket was a gun. I'll let you guess what color his skin was.
• SilentM68 11mo ago
  This is a very useful site :)
• lapetitejort 11mo ago
  Reading these comments, a common through-line seems to be cars. Hit and runs, drive by shootings, cars without plates, cars speeding, breaking into cars, etc. But the concept of disincentivizing cars never seems to be brought up. Close down urban roads to private car traffic. Increase public transportation. Remove subsidies on gas. Build bike lanes. Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
  • p_ing 11mo ago
    Sounds great -- if you're an urbanite and not the ~half of the population [in the US] who doesn't live anywhere near an urban center.
    • sofixa 11mo ago
      It's actually only 20% that live in a rural (not within a metro area - urban or suburban): https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-rural-populations.html https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
      • p_ing 11mo ago
        Time to re-read what "urban" is defined as. My town, for instance, is counted as "urban", yet there is a single bus that will take you anywhere near to true urban center that comes twice per day. It's six miles (~15 minutes) from the nearest non-shit grocery store/Starbucks. My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big. The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
    • lapetitejort 11mo ago
      Reducing unnecessarily bulky trucks with low visibility, increasing fuel efficiencies, and removing gas subsidies absolutely helps the suburban and rural population
    • 10mo ago
• deadfall23 11mo ago
  In my area it's mostly Home Depot and Lowes parking lots. Time to start shopping online more. I'm looking at options for hiding my LP from AI cameras.
  • snohobro 11mo ago
    I had seen an ALPR go up at my local Home Depot. I didn’t know what it was until this website where I zoomed on my town. I thought it was a new light or something. Just more anecdotal evidence to back up what you’re saying.
• lo_zamoyski 11mo ago
  There are two extremes that rash people tend to fall into. The first is the person who has no concern for surveillance. He believes that if you aren't doing anything wrong, you have nothing to fear. You see more of these people in older generations, when institutional trust was irrationally high. The second is the person who responds rabidly to any form or application of surveillance. This is the sort of person who believes that all surveillance is abused, public or private, and if it isn't, that it inevitably will be. Slippery slope fallacy is his motto. A reasonable range of opinion can exist on the subject between those two extremes. Personally, I have no problem with traffic cameras per se. First, we are in a public space where recordings are generally permitted. Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera. Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding). My concerns would have to do with the following. 1) Unauthorized access to accumulated data. You should have to have some kind of legal permission to access the data and to do so in very specific ways. For example, if you neighborhood is being disrupted by loud cars, you can use complaints to get permission to query for footage and license plates of cars identified as loud. Each access is logged for audit purposes. 2) Data fusion. You should not be able to combine datasets without permission either. And when such combination occurs, it should also be scoped appropriately. Queries should then be subject to (1). 3) Indefinite hold. Data should have an expiration date. That is, we should not be able to sequester and store data for indefinite periods of time. 4) Private ownership. The collection of certain kinds of surveillance data should belong only to the public and fall under the strict controls above. The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument.
  • p_ing 11mo ago
    > Second, no one is being stalked or harassed by a fixed camera. Not the camera, no, just the eyes behind it -- namely police officers who have been caught stalking exes via Flock. > Third, there are problems that only surveillance can reasonably solve (loud cars, dangerous speeding). In many jurisdictions in the US, police must personally witness the events to intervene. /Traffic/ cameras are one thing -- they only record those who violate the laws (red light, speeding). But continual monitoring of all persons passing falls into another bucket, like a Stringray device would. > The non-specific and general fear of abuse is not a good counterargument. The abuse of this data is already happening. It's not a hypothetical.
• rcpt 11mo ago
  Can't wait to get out to these meetings and advocate for more speed cameras and red light cameras.
• garyfirestorm 11mo ago
  what is stopping me from putting a bright infrared light on my car angled in a way causing the camera to not be able to detect my plate? overexposed? this should be totally legal afaik since nothing is hiding my plate from any view to a normal human?
  • phildini 11mo ago
    The question would ultimately get settled in court, I think, but a DA who was feeling cop-aligned and vicious could try to ding you for interfering with police operations by _not_ allowing your plate to get scanned.
    • 15155 11mo ago
      These statutes are typically not written with police enforceability in mind: they criminalize "doing something" rather than "having something installed," and a cop isn't typically going to be around or caring/watching when you move past statically-installed ALPR cameras.
  • mikestew 11mo ago
    There are usually laws against making your plate unreadable to plate readers if the readers are used for tolling. Florida is one example.
  • stronglikedan 11mo ago
    good luck with that in some states, like Florida
  • 15155 11mo ago
    Ignoring all of the legal gotchas that aren't very realistically enforceable or relevant: I do not believe you will be able to force overexposure of lettered areas using IR diodes alone. License plates are designed with intentionally high reflective contrast in the offset areas. Even if you could put enough energy into that area, these cameras have switchable IR cutoff filters that are used during the daytime (making this approach only viable at night.) Another idea: a visible-spectrum laser + camera on a tracking gimbal? Absolutely could block (or even destroy!) these types of imaging efforts on a small scale.
• t1234s 11mo ago
  I think this is how they are going to roll out tax-by-the-mile schemes across the US.
• MagicMoonlight 11mo ago
  ANPR is used across the UK and solves an incredible amount of crime. I couldn’t imagine living in a country where you can shoot someone in the street and drive off, and nobody knows where the car went.
  • MatthiasPortzel 11mo ago
    You’re defending a weaker system than the actual system. The system you’re defending is a list of flagged plate numbers and a way of comparing seen plates against that list, and a way of reporting matches to the local police. The actual system logs all cars seen, saves the information forever, and reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want.
    • padjo 11mo ago
      Does America not have data protection laws that prevent this sort of sharing?
    • LazyMans 10mo ago
      >>>reports the data to a third party who can share it with anyone they want. This is a pervasive piece of misinformation. False statements only discredit you and others who choose to repeat it.
  • IlikeKitties 11mo ago
    That means living in a country where the government knows where you are and where you went to at all times. Want to go somewhere King Pedo Protector doesn't approve? Enjoy your Police visit and eventually, arrest.
  • matsz 11mo ago
    I couldn't imagine living in a country where my every move is being watched. Privacy is a human right. Sacrificing your human rights just for a bit of "safety" is just short sighted.
    • SchemaLoad 11mo ago
• guelo 11mo ago
  Missing Oakland. There's no where to submit anything as far as I can tell.
  • phildini 11mo ago
    I don't work with them right now but maybe this will help? https://oakland.ca.civic.band/-/search?q=flock https://oakland.ca.civic.band/-/search?q=flock
• celeryd 11mo ago
  Are these meetings truly constrained to the continental US?
  • phildini 11mo ago
    Where would you want more detail? I've been working on adding Canada to CivicBand: https://civic.band/sites/sites?_sort_desc=pages&state__in=BC,AB,SK,NL https://civic.band/sites/sites?_sort_desc=pages&state__in=BC... I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/ https://senado.pr.civic.band/
• a456463 11mo ago
  Ring! Please stop Ring cameras.... Ugh!!!
  • girvo 11mo ago
    It kind of upsets me that while _I_ will never install one, my bloody neighbours have and it tracks me every time I walk my dog. Gross. Honestly makes me want to vandalise them (though I will not).
    • 15155 11mo ago
      > Honestly makes me want to vandalise them (though I will not). Sounds like the cameras are working? Seems like a reason to put up more cameras: vandals can't take out any two as easily/simultaneously.
      • girvo 11mo ago
        No, I could vandalise them easy enough, I don't because I'm not a criminal who wants to damage my neighbours things, not because it's a camera.
        • 15155 11mo ago
          Of course you could vandalize them easily enough... and be seen doing so from multiple angles: ideally leading to your prosecution and imprisonment or possibly direct kinetic response from their owners. The legal system tends to react even more negatively to those directly attempting to undermine enforcement efforts - such as vandalizing cameras. You're not just doing "bad," you're constructively preventing evidence of your misdeeds from being gathered.
          • mlsu 10mo ago
            You know, I think you may be onto something. Perhaps we all should just live in a massive prison. The cameras should be on us 24/7. Society is nothing without hard rules, by just rulers. Ideally, kinetic enforcement applied for any misdeeds, large or small.
• almosthere 11mo ago
  I'm all for stationary government surveillance EVERYWHERE (in the public), just no surveillance ANYWHERE on individual persons. I think what people do in public should be heavily witnessed and recorded.
  • akudha 11mo ago
    I think what people do in public should be heavily witnessed and recorded What for? I don't understand why you want to record some stranger jogging, drinking coffee, smoking, eating or simply walking and minding their own business. What am I missing?
    • SchemaLoad 11mo ago
      Temporarily it's fine. Store it for a few weeks and then destroy. If something happens to the jogger on their jog we can grab the video, if nothing happens, it's deleted.
  • pickledonions49 11mo ago
    That sets the stage for overreach. If the data is public, and you are getting stalked, there is nowhere to hide. If corporations/organizations/agencies want to exploit your emotions for ads at any given moment of the day because they can see you and almost everything that happens to you, they can. If a lunatic leader gets elected who wants to kill off a specific group of people (nothing lasts forever, including political stability), its now much easier. With all that in mind, can I ask why?
    • almosthere 11mo ago
      Everyone seems to suggest the above narratives, but in truth this is just not the case. Maybe for 0.0000001% of the time it is the narratives above. But the truth is, if Putin or Jay Jones wants someone dead he will get the right spy and do it without a massive surveillance net. No, the vast majority of the use case is stopping crime that today we can't stop. I want the crime to stop.
• dkalola 11mo ago
  "Systems marketed for "solving crimes" get used for immigration enforcement" What immigration enforcement are you speaking of here? Legal? Illegal? If the latter, wouldn't this system be solving crime?
  • 15155 11mo ago
    Yes, but these are laws that "I don't agree with," therefore they can be ignored. Who will pick our crops!?
    • zer0x4d 11mo ago
      People love nothing more than selective application of law. In fact, to most people laws don't apple if: 1. they can get away with it, or 2. they don't agree with it.
  • snigsnog 11mo ago
    [flagged]
  • tkzed49 11mo ago
    I can only conclude that people in this thread are being intentionally obtuse. This isn't a question of ideals; it's addressing the uptick in illegal actions by immigration officials during the current US administration. It's addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas. Yes, some immigration enforcement is legal. Congratulations.
    • 15155 11mo ago
      > addressing the selective application of the law to further conservative agendas Does selectively not enforcing immigration law further liberal agendas? - House seats (and therefore electoral votes) are determined by census - which includes illegal immigrant populations. - If you can waddle across the border at 8.5 months pregnant, you can birth a citizen with no further requirements. Ergo, "sanctuary cities" and other intentional lack of enforcement allow states to pump up their representation in Congress and increase government handouts.
• bomsloth 11mo ago
  [dead]
• exceptione 11mo ago
  All over the world the bed is being made for the autocrats. The new generation of wealthy autocrats have tools at their disposal the previous generations lacked. Like Musk and Vance told the audience, this was the last time it had to vote. The defense industry is something of a foregone era. Most capital has been allocated to surveillance capitalism since last decades, providing very powerful tools to influence and measure the personal lives of the population. But things are shaping up for more active forms of control; as the finance sector is putting all their eggs in the next iteration, LLMs, which is being accepted by the public as a means for thought generation. I am totally not surprised to learn that the government now needs to a) sponsor this business model and b) needs to pull this horse inside government and executive branches. Sure, there are positive use cases to be thought of for LLMs. But lets not be that naive this time, shall we? I mean, Grokopedia anyone?
• bequanna 11mo ago
  How are you monitoring the meeting minutes? Would you open source this?
• snigsnog 11mo ago
  >Systems marketed for "solving crimes" get used for immigration enforcement So for solving crimes. I'm in favor, then!
  • bichiliad 11mo ago
    I think you don’t have to look far to find warrantless arrests or illegal detentions under the guise of “immigration enforcement.” I also think you’d be hard pressed to point to a crime in those instances.
    • 15155 11mo ago
      The ideal amount of mistakes is non-zero. We should compensate those who are improperly arrested and quickly correct these violations, attempt to prevent them in the future, reprimand those involved if necessary, but absolutely keep pushing ahead at full steam on law enforcement efforts otherwise. Hot take: some small number of unlawful arrests aren't the "neener neener neener, you can't stop illegal immigration" that folks seem to think they are.
      • bichiliad 11mo ago
        > The ideal amount of mistakes is non-zero. Why? And separately, do you believe that people wrongly arrested in the US are being compensated accordingly? The justice system in the US isn’t known for being easy or cheap to navigate, and I don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask.
        • 15155 11mo ago
          Because these are human systems involving humans: there will always be mistakes. Advocating for the elimination of 100% of mistakes is a typical "rules for radicals" method of backdoor legislation through increased bureaucracy. I'm not advocating to "move fast and break things," but that it's very easy and cheap for illegal immigration maximalists to advocate that society should "move never so nothing breaks." This type of obstruction is actually a form of conservative policy, but "it's for the causes I like so it's okay." > don’t think getting a warrant before detaining people is that huge of an ask The law doesn't require a warrant before detaining people - and shouldn't. This doesn't even make sense: "Hold on Mr. Bank Robber - I'm not detaining you, but pretty please don't go anywhere, I gotta go get a warrant first!"
• atymic 11mo ago
  Clicked a random one and it's a document about a flock of ducks :-) https://www.gtwp.com/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_10222025-1611 https://www.gtwp.com/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_10222025...
  • lukeinator42 11mo ago
    that was quite the wild read, haha. Looks like they're going to have further meetings about the ducks but the conclusion of this meeting is that: "There was consensus among the Zoning Board of Appeals that the applicant has demonstrated emotional support ducks are necessary but did not come to a consensus on what would be reasonable regarding the number of ducks, the size and location of the enclosure, and conditions of approval."
• samsudin 11mo ago
  [flagged]
• gsibble 11mo ago
  If you think privacy exists in any real capacity anymore, you're a moron.
• owlninja 11mo ago
  > Authorize Execution of a Public Right-of-Way Use Agreement Granting Flock Group, Inc. a License to Install and Maintain Non-Police Department Flock License Plate Reader Cameras on Public Rights-of Way and Establish Fees for Permitting, Inspection, and Usage This is on my town and seems like strange wording. What the heck are private flock cameras? >The City and Flock have negotiated a Right-of-Way Use Agreement, which will grant Flock a non-exclusive license to install and maintain certain private cameras within the City's ROW. The agreement is for a period of twenty (20) years and may be renewed for up to two (2) successive five (5) year terms. Flock will be responsible for paying the permit and inspection fees for existing private cameras within the City's ROW and for any newly installed private cameras within the ROW as well as for an annual ROW usage fee on a per camera basis for the right to install cameras within the City's ROW. 20 years...
• bichiliad 11mo ago
  Genuine question: I’m someone who hates the centralization of data with companies like Flock. I also want safer streets. I have liked things like speed cameras and bus-mounted bus lane cameras specifically because they target the problem without the need for police involvement. How do you get the latter without ALPRs? Or do ALPRs indicate cameras specifically collecting license plates independent of active enforcement?
  • tptacek 11mo ago
    ALPRs are generally just cameras that create searchable timestamped databases of identified vehicles, private or public. But they're only really useful for public entities, because they're the only ones who can in the general case do anything with a tagged car (look up who owns it, curb it, &c).
  • moleperson 11mo ago
    Right next to my apartment building is a crosswalk that crosses a fairly busy street. The crosswalk is well-marked, and it has a sign in the median specifically stating that stopping for pedestrians is required by law. In the time I've lived here I've nearly been hit by cars several times on this crosswalk, and I've witnessed countless people almost get hit here as well. Once I saw a pedestrian yell at the driver, and the driver yelled back that they didn't have to stop because "I don't have a stop sign". I noticed recently that the city installed a flock camera pointed directly at this crosswalk, and while I'm generally opposed to this kind of surveillance, and I wish they would implement other measures to make this safer, I really would love nothing more than for drivers speeding through here and not stopping for pedestrians to get ticketed. It's unclear still whether that's actually happening (and not that it matters once you're dead), but I'm finding myself empathizing with the argument for more surveillance for the first time in my life.
    • nielsole 10mo ago
      In Shanghai there's lots of strobe lights on major intersections to presumably take clean license plate pictures of people driving against traffic after an illegal turn. Pretty plausible it significantly increases compliance.
• Verlyn139 11mo ago
  The state of this thread lol, buch of trump bootlickers, i hope he go to hell soon
• jmward01 11mo ago
  I'm all about monitoring privacy related things, but I think the bigger piece here is the monitoring of city counsels for this kind of data. Wow! I just hadn't thought about doing that before. This is a massive trove of information and building a strong, more generic platform around it could yield huge insights to enable fast action as municipalities start implementing things. I have actually built some code to review local city counsel meetings by transcribing them and downloading meeting packets but opening this up at a larger scale could be a massive thing.
  • phildini 11mo ago
    Hi there! I've built the beginnings of this platform at https://civic.band https://civic.band and https://civic.observer https://civic.observer. We track City Councils, Boards of Supervisors, really any municipality we can get our hands on. I'm very open to how to make this better!
    • jmward01 10mo ago
      Thanks! I'll give it a look
  • throwaranay4933 11mo ago
    https://www.civicsearch.org/ https://www.civicsearch.org/ pulls city council transcripts from YouTube etc
• stackedinserter 11mo ago
  Why aren't those flock cameras being destroyed all the time in the US? In our city people vandalized speed cameras all the time, so eventually government gave up and just banned them in the whole province. I'm not sure they did that because of being vandalized, but at least there was direct actionable push back.
  • LazyMans 10mo ago
    I'd probably think people getting bills for hundreds in the mail is a good catalyst to take action on a speed camera. A camera that is used for serious crimes, not speeding, is not going to be nearly as inflammatory.
• shinhyeok 11mo ago
  As a Korean, this is hilarious
  • mnau 10mo ago
    Why? Is Korea at UK-level dystopia nightmare?
• schoen 11mo ago
  When I was working at EFF I would complain about people creating "persistent unique identifiers", and particularly ones that someone can passively log. Many governments probably have classified databases that are more intrusive than the ALPR databases, based on electronic surveillance means, which engineers might have been able to mitigate through more cautious protocol design. I've thought that license plates themselves are such a persistent unique identifier, but one that we sort of didn't notice until the recognition and storage technologies got cheaper. The original motivation for license plates seems to be about enforcing safety inspections of cars (maybe also liability insurance?). Nowadays we also have a lot of other uses that have piled up. The top two I think are very popular: allowing victims of crimes involving motor vehicles to identify the vehicles reliably, and allowing police to catch fugitives in vehicular pursuits. Maybe these were actually even considered part of the original motivation for license plate requirements. Below that, still fairly popular, you have allowing non-moving violation citations such as parking tickets; allowing police to randomly notice wanted persons' vehicles that happen to be nearby; and allowing government agencies another enforcement lever for other stuff by threatening to cancel previously-issued plates. (Oh yeah, and nowadays also paying for parking online!) I could imagine more modern approaches that would put more technological limitations on some of these things, but I guess any change would be controversial not least because you're intentionally taking some data away from law enforcement (which I think is a normal thing to want to do). The one that's really hard is the "victims of crimes easily identifying vehicles". If you replace license plates with something that's not easily to memorize or write down, the reporting gets a lot harder. Maybe we could try to have license plates change frequently using something like format-preserving encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption) so they still appear like existing license plate formats, and then prevent law enforcement agents or agencies from directly receiving the decryption keys, so they have to actively interact with the plate issuer in order to answer specific investigative questions about specific vehicles. If police receive a report of a crime they can ask to find out what the involved vehicle's displayed plate will change to on specific dates. This would have the problem that a partial or mistranscribed or misremembered plate would be pretty useless (you couldn't easily search for, or detect, a partial plate match). You could add some error correcting codes to the plate numbers, but I don't think existing plate numbers are long enough for that. Also, if the plate numbers didn't change very frequently, you could probably partially deanonymize ALPR datasets based on recurring patterns of locations over time. The best lesson is probably that, if you make a new technical system, you should be very cautious about the identifiers that go into that system, as they may still exist decades later, and used for new kinds of tracking and new kinds of surveillance that you didn't anticipate.
• BimJeam 11mo ago
  We need that for Europe, too.
• spencerflem 11mo ago
  I would pay a hundred thousand dollars to get a 24/7 video feed of Peter Thiel
• unkulunkulu 11mo ago
  I believe a reasonable push back to this surveillance increase should be “incresing law precision”, like “fines for making a really dangerous maneuver vs driving fast on an empty road” “really scaring someone on a bike vs driving on a sidewalk in general”
• elwell 11mo ago
  I, for one, welcome surveillance.
• csmpltn 11mo ago
  The goal is to intimidate criminals, and mitigate crime. What’s wrong with that?
  • calcifer 10mo ago
    Honestly, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" is a juvenile take in a post-Snowden world.
  • petargyurov 10mo ago
    You aren't the one deciding what is a crime and what isn't.
  • 3D30497420 10mo ago
    It does not take much imagination to see how use of these tools can be easily abused. There are already stories of abuse, here are a few: https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/what-the-flock-police-surveillance-is-ripe-for-abuse/ https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/what-the-flock-police-surveilla... (Many more can be found with a quick Google search.)
• sneak 10mo ago
  Many metros, including Las Vegas and LA, have rolled out thousands of facial recognition traffic cameras above the signals at intersections. The ALPR situation is trivial by comparison. Transportation privacy is a historical oddity. You can’t drive down the road in a major metro or walk down an airport concourse without being identified and tracked by your facial geometry. The US federal government seems to be entirely hellbent on accumulating facial biometrics on the entire population.
• olliem36 10mo ago
  Surveillance of the surveillants to prevent the surveilled
• ponker 10mo ago
  For an alternate perspective on these drones, see this interview with rapper "DreamLife Rizzy" where he talks about how these technologies have made it impossible for him and his associates to do crimes in San Francisco https://nypost.com/2025/12/11/us-news/sf-rapper-dreamllife-rizzy-slams-police-drones/ https://nypost.com/2025/12/11/us-news/sf-rapper-dreamllife-r...
• rhgraysonii 10mo ago
  Is the site open source? I see some issues in the map display I would like to fix.
• avipars 10mo ago
  There are some false positives, https://cityofmidlandmi.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_10212025-2994 https://cityofmidlandmi.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_10... Mentions "flock" when referring to a flock of turkeys - not flock cameras
• reboot_boom 10mo ago
  Similar but different project: https://sunders.uber.space https://sunders.uber.space > Surveillance under Surveillance shows you cameras and guards — watching you — almost everywhere.