Comment by dvtkrlbs
2 days ago
Yes and the biggest problem with this kind of ALPRs are they bypass the due process. Most of the time police can just pull up data without any warrant and there has been instances where this was abused (I think some cops used this for stalking their exes [1]) and also the most worrying Flock seems to really okay with giving ICE unlimited access to this data [2] [3] (which I speculate for loose regulations).
[1]: https://lookout.co/georgia-police-chief-arrested-for-using-f... [2]: https://www.404media.co/emails-reveal-the-casual-surveillanc... [3]: https://www.404media.co/ice-taps-into-nationwide-ai-enabled-...
I'm sure the 40 percent of cops who are domestic abusers and the white supremacists militias recruited wholesale into ICE will use this power responsibly.
You can go onto the ICE subreddit and see a ton of posts that ask if their previous domestic abuse/gross misconduct/ejection from police academy/etc will effect their ICE application.
These aren't people who should hold any kind of intel. It's an actual danger to the population to give these people this much power.
When you give access to any system that collects the personal information including location data for people in the US to the police, a percentage of the police will always use those systems for stalking their exes.
Don't forget we even saw that in the Snowden leaks.
Those were people with much higher scrutiny and background checking than your average cop. Those were people that themselves were more closely monitored. And yet... we want to give that to an average cop? People who have a higher than average rate of domestic abuse?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LOVEINT
What is not only true for police but for every sufficiently big group of people.
Cops do have some unique tendencies but I think the real issue is the cops are able to leverage the power of the government in ways other large groups cannot.
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I keep an unofficial record of instances where police and similar authorities have abused their access to these types of systems. The list is long. It's almost exclusively men stalking ex-partners or attractive women they don't know, but have seen in public.
What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
So now with Flock and data brokers we have authorities having access to information that was originally held behind a judge's signature. Often with little oversight, and frequently for unofficial, abusive purposes.
This reality also ties back to the discussion about providing the "good guys" encryption backdoors. The reality is that there are no "good guys", everyone exists in shades of grey, and I dare say there are people in forces whom are attracted to the power the role provides, rather than any desire for public service.
In conclusion it's a fundamental design flaw to rely on the operator being a "good guy", and that's before we get into the problem of leaks, bugs, and flaws in the security model, or in this case: complete open access to the public web - laughable, farcical, and horrifying.
And my guess is we only ever find out about some probably very small percentage of the abuses by police, at least in theory having rules and oversight of their use of these systems.
What are the chances that nobody at Flock has ever abused their access?
Cynical-me assumes that if you're the sort of person who'd take a job at a company like Flock, which I and evidently a lot of other people consider morally bankrupt, then you are at least as likely as a typical cop to think that stalking your exes or random attractive people you see - is just a perk of your job, not something that should come with jail time.
No idea why you're being downvoted, this is all true.
Same was found in Australia when they looked into police access of data [0] [1] [2]
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/article/2024/jun/...
[1] https://www.abc.net.au/news/2022-12-15/victoria-police-leap-...
[2] https://www.ccc.qld.gov.au/sites/default/files/Docs/Public-H...
> What's frightening is it's not rare, it actually happens constantly, and this is just within the systems which have a high level of internal logging/user-tracking.
Would not be surprised if these types of abuse serve to obfuscate other abusive uses as well and are thus part of the system operating as it should. Flood the internal logging with all kinds of this "low-level" stuff, hiding the high-level warrantless tracking.
Maybe with these systems we should require them TO be open for anyone to query against. Maybe then people would care more about how they impact their privacy.
IIRC, this happened in Washington state: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules...
And as a result, they got rid of the cameras. Funny how that works!
Flock’s objective is to hope people don’t care long enough to reach IPO. Will enough people care to dis enable this corporate dragnet surveillance apparatus? Remains to be seen. I don’t much care about the grift of dumping this pig onto the public markets (caveat emptor), but we should care about its continued use as a weapon against domestic citizens without effective governance and due process.