Below is all that is needed to understand the threat FLOCK and other ALPR companies present to the rights of citizens. When used in coordination with other technologies including but not limited to geo-locational technology, Artificial Intelligence, Facial Recognition Technology, smart phones, Radio Frequency Identification (RFID), Intelligent Street Lights, and drones there is a surveillance state. Cities around the country have settled lawsuits, often with non-disclosure agreements to avoid large payouts awarded by a court or jury for the misidentification of people. More than 53 cities have terminated contracts with FLOCK and many more decided not to implement FLOCK in the first place.
For those who have a biblical world view the attempt for Man to have godlike power is abhorrent. Only God, Almighty is all powerful, all knowing, and always present. It did not work out well for Lucifer when he and one-third of the Angels thought they could have the power of God. At a certain point, one which we as a country have already reached, information becomes power and power becomes control. Not even God, Almighty wants to control all mankind, thus God has provided people with Free Will.
Finally, a free society and a surveillance state cannot be reconciled. With freedom comes risk. China has all of the aforementioned technologies and uses them on the Chinese people to create a Social Credit Score. The best that can be said about the Social Credit Score is people know what their score is in real time. It affects the cost of travel and many other everyday activities in China. In the United States we have numerous watchlists.
Unlike the transparency of the system in China where people know what their score is, citizens in the United States do not know how many different watchlists there are. We do not know who is maintaining all the watchlists. Many of the federal government agencies and departments have their own internal watchlist not to mention all the watchlists our seventeen intelligence agencies maintain. Often the reasoning for why a person is on a watchlist is based on erroneous information but because there is so little transparency with watchlists, people do even know they are on a watch list or why they are on a watchlist. Citizens have no way to challenge incorrect information unless or until they are arrested. At that time a person can be ruined in many ways including financially, with their employer, friends, and even family members.
In 2003, the Terrorist Screening Center was intended to consolidate all watchlists. Consider we have seventeen intelligence agencies and countless law enforcement entities, many of which have their own internal watchlists. Prayerfully, I would like to believe all the information collected and shared by these different entities is used to keep us safe. You do not know how many watchlists you may be on. By the time you find out you are perhaps only on one watchlist it may be too late.
1) FLOCK
Between a Los Angeles photo shoot and a Minnesota Kohl’s, a private camera network decided a car reviewer was a car thief.
Flock Safety‘s cameras did exactly what they were built to do on the day four squad cars boxed in Joel Feder outside a Kohl’s in Plymouth, Minnesota. They read a plate, matched it against a hot list, and told the police where the car was. Nothing malfunctioned. The network passed along a bad piece of data with the same authority it gives a good one, and a journalist ended up standing in a parking lot with his hands up while officers rested theirs on their holsters.
The bad data had been sitting in the system for days. A Jaguar Land Rover dealership in Los Angeles misplaced a plate during a photo shoot and reported it lost. New Jersey prints its manufacturer plates with the middle characters in tiny type, and by the time the report reached law enforcement those digits had fallen off, so plate 34 03 DTM was logged as 34 DTM. Flock’s cameras cannot read the small middle numbers either. They looked at 34 10 DTM on the Range Rover Feder had borrowed as a press loaner, saw 34 DTM, and started telling the Plymouth police they had found a stolen vehicle. Two systems with the same blind spot confirmed each other, and their agreement became probable cause for an armed stop.
A camera reports what it thinks it sees, and it reports it with the same certainty every time. Doubt is outside its vocabulary. It has no way to flag that the characters in the middle of a plate fall below the resolution of its sensor and the read should be thrown out. It returns a plate number, a timestamp and a location, and a wrong answer arrives looking precisely like a right one. Everything downstream inherits that false confidence, including the officer who gets out of the car with his hand near his weapon.
The police in Plymouth had a seventeen-character VIN, stamped into the vehicle at the factory and checked against a state database, and it came back clean. They also had a camera hit generated by a machine that could not see two of the digits it was ruling on. “The plates on this car are stolen,” Officer Max Ganshyn told Feder. The department kept the camera’s story and set the VIN aside. The human in the loop, the safeguard these contracts are sold on, turned out to be the part of the system most willing to believe the machine.
By Flock’s own numbers, its readers capture plates accurately about 93 percent of the time across roughly 20 billion vehicles a month. The company offers that figure as reassurance. Seven percent of 20 billion is 1.4 billion misreads a month, and any of them can land on a cruiser’s screen as grounds for a stop. Sharper cameras will not solve this. A higher accuracy rate applied to a far larger population of scanned drivers still produces bad hits by the million, and it produces them overwhelmingly against people who have done nothing wrong, since those are the people the network spends its day looking at. More technology here does not mean fewer errors. It means the same error rate industrialized and aimed at the public.
Making an error and unmaking one run on completely different hardware. Feder’s misread propagated across a national network in milliseconds. Undoing it meant getting the LAPD to amend the original report and push the fix into Flock’s system, which Jaguar Land Rover was trying to arrange by phone on a Sunday afternoon while everyone stood in the lot.
Ganshyn was already tracking four other cars ( Cut and paste this link if it doesn’t open --- https://www.kare11.com/article/news/local/breaking-the-news/automotive-journalist-surrounded-by-police-due-to-flock-camera-confusion/89-f65ee040-3216-43f1-91e2-e8dde53d419c ) on the same 34 ## DTM plate pattern that week, and any Flock partner department in the country would have flagged them off the same broken report. Feder was told to drive straight home and leave the car parked. “You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth,” the officer said. “If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.” That is the state’s own advice to an innocent man: stay off the roads because we cannot switch this thing off.
A week of surveillance and an armed stop ran their course without a warrant. The Fourth Amendment assumes a human being forms a suspicion and can be made to answer for it afterward.
A camera network hands police a suspicion pre-formed, generated by a private vendor’s software and stamped with a confidence nobody has to defend. There is no affidavit and no probable cause a judge could examine, only a hit on a screen. Nobody in Plymouth chose to hunt Joel Feder for a week. The surveillance system chose, and there is no one to depose.
The Institute for Justice counts at least 26 cases since 2018 ( cut and paste this link if it doesn’t open https://ij.org/dozens-of-innocent-motorists-have-been-pulled-over-detained-at-gunpoint-or-jailed-due-to-ai-license-plate-camera-errors/ ) in which Flock misreads led to innocent people being pulled over, held at gunpoint, jailed, or attacked by police dogs, most of them since 2023. Those are the documented ones, the cases where somebody had the standing and the resources to make a record. A false hit that ends in a felony stop is a different experience depending on who is behind the wheel, and the network cannot tell the difference. It reads the plate. Officers arrive with their assumptions intact.
Responsibility thins out as it travels down the chain. Flock sells the alert and disclaims the arrest. The department acted on the information it was given. The clerk in Los Angeles filled out a form. All of them performed their function, and a man with clean plates and a clean VIN was surrounded by four squad cars in a shopping center parking lot on a Sunday. The police report, when it arrived days later, confirmed the plate had never been stolen at all. “The plate was reported as NJ 34DTM instead of NJ 3403DTM,” it read.
Two weeks before officers boxed him in, The Drive had run a report on Flock cameras being wired into a wider surveillance apparatus, one that reaches past plates toward phones, wearables, and even pets.
The story went viral and was shared tens of thousands of times. Then the same kind of network came for one of the people who had warned about it, on the strength of five characters and a typo.
Plate readers are only the highest-volume version of a failure that is turning up wherever police have wired a probabilistic system into a squad car.
Detroit officers arrested Robert Williams in his driveway in 2020 on the strength of a facial recognition match against a blurry surveillance still, then arrested Porcha Woodruff, eight months pregnant, on another bad match three years later.
Chicago prosecutors held Michael Williams for nearly a year on a gunshot-detection alert that pointed at the wrong noise.
The software in those cases offered a candidate and the officers downstream took delivery of a conclusion, which is the same trade the Plymouth department made in the Kohl’s lot. The vendors describe these tools as leads to be corroborated. The lead arrives with a badge number attached to it, and the work of proving the machine wrong is left to whoever is already in handcuffs.
2) FLOCK cameras as bad as they are, should not be discussed without referring to FLOCK's app called Mobile Fortify. Literally, every law enforcement officer in the country has the ability to download Mobile Fortify and turn their smartphone into a FLOCK camera. FLOCK also incentivizes local law enforcement to share Mobile Fortify with other local jurisdictions provided the other local jurisdiction does not have a prohibition regarding the use of FLOCK cameras/network.
You should also be aware that FLOCK negotiates with private landowners to install cameras on their property. Normally a non-disclosure agreement is signed. I am working with state legislators about the issue. The reality is we are losing the battle but will not lose the war. A recent SCOTUS ruling has given us hope. I do not breach the confidentiality agreement I have with people in elected office. I can say I am in discussions with people in your state and in senate leadership nationally. We just published a new article I humbly encourage you to read. https://constitutionalalliance.org/urgent-need-to-provide-an-update-to-our-previous-two-articles/
3) Don't like car license plate readers invading your privacy? It's about to get a lot worse
A company called Leonardo already develops and sells automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). These are cameras that visually see your vehicle as it drives by, recording your plate for any number of reasons, though probably because you ran a red light or missed a stop sign. Now, it seems the company has plans to go a little further.
It's not an optical upgrade, though. There are plans to add sensors to its cameras in the form of an "advanced signal intelligence system." As reported by 404 Media, ELSAG SignalTrace is a system that sweeps up unique identifiers of electronic devices that give off signals. The idea is to track or identify specific devices in passengers in cars. You probably see where this is going.
A Frightening Amount Of Surveillance Data
Leonardo
Effectively, the SignalTrace technology is set to move ALPR cameras from just car-tracking to people-tracking devices. Leonardo says that the system "integrates seamlessly with the ELSAG Enterprise Operations Center, our standard data management and analysis software." According to the product sheet, SignalTrace “bridges license plate recognition data with sensor-captured device identifiers – such as those from mobile phones, Bluetooth wearables, and vehicle systems – to create a unique, trackable ‘electronic fingerprintʼ for investigative use.
Related video: Traffic safety concerns over Flock camera poles (WKRN Nashville)View on Watch WKRN Nashville
Traffic safety concerns over Flock camera poles
Tonight, new safety questions surrounding cameras designed to fight crime,
Included in the kinds of signals SignalTrace can pull in to fingerprint are things like RFID tags in key cards and pet microchips. That also includes devices with Bluetooth such as wireless headphones, fitness trackers, cell phones, laptops, or tablets. Even components of a car that give off signals, like tire pressure sensors, infotainment systems, and vehicle hotspots could be monitored, logged, and tied to a specific vehicle with a specific registration.
The Digital Fingerprint
Leonardo
“When multiple devices consistently move together with a vehicle, SignalTraceʼs algorithms link them to that vehicleʼs license plate and time-stamped location data. This correlation provides investigators with another layer of actionable intelligence, even if a suspect changes or removes a plate,” the sheet reads. But, it's not just targeting individuals suspected of committing a crime – it's every car that passes. The ALPR and SignalTrace technology “stores device and correlation data securely in the EOC Enterprise Operations Center for future queries and analysis.”
Via 404 Media and according to procurement records maintained by the transparency website Widely Reported, Leonardo sells ALPR cameras and communications equipment to law enforcement, border security, and other government agencies. Leonardo's US arm has contracts with US Special Operations Command and the General Services Administration. As far as we can tell, Leonardo US Cyber and Security Solutions is one of the branches of the massive aerospace, defense, and security company Leonardo S.p.A, headquartered in Rome, Italy.
CarBuzz Insight – Why This Matters:
Leonardo
ALPR systems have been around for a long time but have been limited to tracking just the vehicles and are not able to identify occupants. That is changing quickly with the advent of AI and the sheer proliferation of camera surveillance in the US, most notably with Flock cameras, and SignalTrace is also looking to cast a wide net and collect a huge amount of tracking data. With that comes many, many concerns ranging from the level of tracking to who has access to all the data being collected.
The argument for such granular surveillance is that it benefits law enforcement. However, that's tempered by how we've already seen abuses of data access by police officers for stalking, and automated systems throwing up false positives leading to innocent people being pulled over at gunpoint.
Perhaps more chilling, though, is that the collection and storage of data is carried out by corporations, not law enforcement agencies. That brings up all sorts of questions about access and security before we even talk about privacy and the deeper dangers of a surveillance state.
4) FBI Plan to Access License Plate Data Could Track Drivers Nationwide - Newsweek
May 19, 2026 at 11:51 AM EDT license plate reader (ALPR) data nationwide, a purchase that would allow the agency to track vehicle movements across the country without a warrant.
The plan was first reported by independent news company 404 Media, which found out about it through a procurement contract pursued by the FBI. The FBI is looking for a vendor that will let it log into a Software as a Service (SaaS) and query the collected ALPRs with license plate information, a description of the vehicle, a time or date, and geolocation information.
Dare To Dream: Explore The American Dream Index
FBI Most Wanted Fugitive Captured by Border Patrol Agents5 min read
Federal law enforcement agencies like the FBI generally must secure a warrant in order to access a person’s location data from cellphone providers. Using ALPR data would allow the FBI to track a person’s movements without the need to go through a judge and obtain a warrant—including those of millions of ordinary drivers who have never committed a crime.
An automated license plate reader is seen mounted on a pole in San Francisco on June 13, 2024. | Justin Sullivan/Getty Images
https://www.thedrive.com/news/cops-are-already-using-license-plate-readers-to-stalk-people
What Information Can Be Accessed Through ALPRs?
ALPR systems rely on high-speed, computer-controlled cameras and software to automatically capture, analyze and store all license plate information of vehicles that come into view, including license plate number, location, date and time.
This data, which includes photographs of the vehicle and sometimes its driver and/or passengers, is then inserted into enormous databases to generate alerts and create records of vehicle activity.
It is a fairly well-established technology that has been "part of law enforcement’s toolkit for well over two decades," according to the Department of Homeland Security (DHS). Officers and detectives use it as an investigative tool, an intelligence tool and a traffic management tool; but the system is also extensively used for toll collection, parking management, property management, and neighborhood watch and other community safety programs.
While not new, the technology is being made more effective and cheaper by advances in machine learning and the rise of AI—in a way that is also setting off alarm bells for Americans concerned about their privacy.
On their own, individual scans reveal little. But when combined across multiple cameras and over time, they can create a timeline of where a vehicle has traveled, including routes taken, frequent stops and patterns of movement. ALPRs can offer a detailed, even intimate portrait of a driver’s life and history—including who they see and where they go, whether that is a health center, an immigration clinic, a gun shop or a place of worship.
This level of aggregation could reveal sensitive details about a person’s life, such as where they:
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live and work
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seek medical care
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attend religious or political events
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travel on a regular basis
Civil rights groups have raised concerns over ALPRs over the years, with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) warning that the data of millions of ordinary drivers is being collected and stored for years, or even indefinitely, by police departments and private companies, with few or no restrictions to protect privacy rights.
Why Does the FBI Want to Buy This Data?
The FBI has been buying data that can be used to track people’s movements and location history for months now, as the agency’s director Kash Patel admitted during a Senate hearing on March 18.
This is essentially a loophole around the requirement for law enforcement agencies to obtain a warrant in order to access a person’s location data from cellphone providers.
According to what Patel told the Senate in March, the FBI does "purchase commercially available information that’s consistent with the Constitution and the laws under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act." These purchases have 'led to some valuable intelligence" for the agency, he added.
Worried about surveillance, states enact privacy laws and restrict license plate readers
As part of its deportation efforts, the Trump administration has ordered states to hand over personal data from voter rolls, driver’s license records and programs such as Medicaid and food stamps.
At the same time, the administration is trying to consolidate the bits of personal data held across federal agencies, creating a single trove of information on people who live in the United States.
Many left-leaning states and cities are trying to protect their residents’ personal information amid the immigration crackdown. But a growing number of conservative lawmakers also want to curb the use of surveillance technologies, such as automated license plate readers, that can be used to identify and track people.
Related articles
Lawmakers in one state are considering regulating police use of automated license plate readers
Alleging ‘secrecy,’ ACLU and Eugene resident sue city for Flock camera records
Conservative-led states such as Arkansas, Idaho and Montana (cut and paste if unable to open this link https://legiscan.com/MT/bill/SB282/2025 ) enacted laws last year designed to protect the personal data collected through license plate readers and other means. They joined at least five left-leaning states ( cut and paste this link if unable to open https://stateline.org/2025/11/25/homeland-security-wants-state-drivers-license-data-for-sweeping-citizenship-program/ ) — Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New York and Washington — that specifically blocked U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement from accessing their driver’s license records.
In addition, Democratic-led cities in Colorado, Illinois, Massachusetts, New York, North Carolina ( cut and paste if unable to open this link https://dailytarheel.com/article/city-hillsborough-flock-safety-cameras-20251111 ) , Texas and Washington last year terminated their contracts with Flock Safety, the largest provider of license plate readers in the U.S.
The Trump administration’s goal is to create a “surveillance dragnet across the country,” said William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project, a nonprofit that advocates for stronger privacy laws.
We're entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance.
– William Owen, communications director at the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project
“We’re entering an increasingly dystopian era of high-tech surveillance,” Owen said. Intelligence sharing between various levels of government, he said, has “allowed ICE to sidestep sanctuary laws and co-opt local police databases and surveillance tools, including license plate readers, facial recognition and other technologies.”
A new Montana law bars government entities from accessing electronic communications and related material without a warrant. Republican state Sen. Daniel Emrich, the law’s author, said “the most important thing that our entire justice system is based on is the principle against unlawful search and seizure” — the right enshrined in the Fourth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
“It’s tough to find individuals who are constitutionally grounded and understand the necessity of keeping the Fourth Amendment rights intact at all times for all reasons — with minimal or zero exceptions,” Emrich said in an interview.
ICE did not respond to Stateline’s requests for comment.
Automated License Plate Readers
Recently, cities and states have grown particularly concerned over the use of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), which are high-speed camera and computer systems that capture license plate information on vehicles that drive by. These readers sit on top of police cars and streetlights or can be hidden within construction barrels and utility poles.
Some cameras collect data that gets stored in databases for years, raising concerns among privacy advocates.
One report from the Brennan Center for Justice, a progressive think tank at New York University, found the data can be susceptible to hacking. Different agencies have varying policies on how long they keep the data, according to the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a law enforcement advocacy group.
Supporters of the technology, including many in law enforcement, say the technology is a powerful tool for tracking down criminal suspects.
Flock Safety says it has cameras in more than 5,000 communities and is connected to more than 4,800 law enforcement agencies across 49 states. The company claims its cameras conduct more than 20 billion license plate reads a month. It collects the data and gives it to police departments, which use the information to locate people.
Holly Beilin, a spokesperson for Flock Safety, told Stateline that while there are local police agencies that may be working with ICE, the company does not have a contractual relationship with the agency. Beilin also said that many liberal and even sanctuary cities continue to sign contracts with Flock Safety. She noted that the cameras have been used to solve some high-profile crimes, including identifying and leading police to the man who committed the Brown University shooting and killed an MIT professor at the end of last year.
“Agencies and cities are very much able to use this technology in a way that complies with their values. So they do not have to share data out of state,” Beilin said.
Pushback Over Data’s Use
But critics, such as the American Civil Liberties Union, say that Flock Safety’s cameras are not only “giving even the smallest-town police chief access to an enormously powerful driver-surveillance tool,” but also that the data is being used by ICE. One news outlet, 404 Media, obtained records of these searches and found many were being carried out by local officers on behalf of ICE.
Last spring, the Denver City Council unanimously voted to terminate its contract with Flock Safety, but Democratic Mayor Mike Johnston unilaterally extended the contract in October, arguing that the technology was a useful crime-fighting tool.
The ACLU of Colorado has vehemently opposed the cameras, saying last August that audit logs from the Denver Police Department show more than 1,400 searches had been conducted for ICE since June 2024.
“The conversation has really gotten bigger because of the federal landscape and the focus, not only on immigrants and the functionality of ICE right now, but also on the side of really trying to reduce and or eliminate protections in regards to access to reproductive care and gender affirming care,” Anaya Robinson, public policy director at the ACLU of Colorado.
“When we erode rights and access for a particular community, it’s just a matter of time before that erosion starts to touch other communities.”
Jimmy Monto, a Democratic city councilor in Syracuse, New York, led the charge to eliminate Flock Safety’s contract in his city. “Syracuse has a very large immigrant population, a very large new American population, refugees that have resettled and been resettled here. So it’s a very sensitive issue,” Monto said, adding that license plate readers allow anyone reviewing the data to determine someone’s immigration status without a warrant.
“When we sign a contract with someone who is collecting data on the citizens who live in a city, we have to be hyper-focused on exactly what they are doing while we’re also giving police departments the tools that they need to also solve homicides, right?” Monto said.
“Certainly, if license plate readers are helpful in that way, I think the scope is right. But we have to make sure that that’s what we’re using it for, and that the companies that we are contracting with are acting in good faith.”
Emrich, the Montana lawmaker, said everyone should be concerned about protecting constitutional privacy rights, regardless of their political views.
“If the government is obtaining data in violation of constitutional rights, they could be violating a whole slew of individuals’ constitutional rights in pursuit of the individuals who may or may not be protected under those same constitutional rights,” he said.
6)Flock Uses AI
Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance
Flouild its Surveillance AIck Uses Overseas Gig Workers to B
Flock Uses Overseas Gig Workers to Build its Surveillance AI
Dec 1, 2025 at 9:00 AM
Flock accidentally exposed training materials and a panel which tracked what its AI annotators were working on. It showed that Flock, which has cameras in thousands of U.S. communities, is using workers in the Philippines to review and classify footage.
This article was produced with support from WIRED.
Flock, the automatic license plate reader (ALPR) and AI-powered camera company, uses overseas workers from Upwork to train its machine learning algorithms, with training material telling workers how to review and categorize footage including images people and vehicles in the U.S., according to material reviewed by 404 Media that was accidentally exposed by the company.
The findings bring up questions about who exactly has access to footage collected by Flock surveillance cameras and where people reviewing the footage may be based. Flock has become a pervasive technology in the U.S., with its cameras present in thousands of communities that cops use everyday to investigate things like car jackings. Local police have also performed numerous lookups for ICE in the system.
Companies that use AI or machine learning regularly turn to overseas workers to train their algorithms, often because the labor is cheaper than hiring domestically. But the nature of Flock’s business—creating a surveillance system that constantly monitors U.S. residents’ movements—means that footage might be more sensitive than other AI training jobs.
Do you work at Flock or know more about the company? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at joseph.404 or send me an email at joseph@404media.co (cut and paste if link does not open).
Flock’s cameras continuously scan the license plate, color, brand, and model of all vehicles that drive by. Law enforcement are then able to search cameras nationwide to see where else a vehicle has driven. Authorities typically dig through this data without a warrant, leading the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) and Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) to recently sue a city blanketed in nearly 500 Flock cameras.
Broadly, Flock uses AI or machine learning to automatically detect license plates, vehicles, and people (link may no longer be active), including what clothes they are wearing, from camera footage. A Flock patent (search US11416545.pdf https://patents.google.com/patent/US11416545B1/en ) also mentions cameras detecting “race.”
Multiple tipsters pointed 404 Media to an exposed online panel which showed various metrics associated with Flock’s AI training.