Flock cameras are fixed, artificial intelligence-powered automated license plate readers created by the Flock Safety company. The system captures images of passing vehicles that include license plates, make, model, color, and unique details of the car, such as body damage and bumper stickers. Local and federal law enforcement agencies use the stored data to search for vehicle movements related to criminal investigations.
There’s growing concern, however, that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is accessing the Flock camera database to locate undocumented immigrants during mass deportation operations, and in some cases, to identify anti-ICE protesters. Other concerns relate to government tracking of individuals seeking reproductive or gender-affirming healthcare and other abuses of this data, resulting in the erosion of personal privacy.
In response to this new mass surveillance technology, citizens in dozens of cities and town across the U.S. are organizing to demand municipal governments terminate license plate reader contracts and remove or disable local Flock cameras. Between The Lines’ Scott Harris spoke with Hanna Riley Fernandez, a Vermont-based writer and activist, who discusses Flock cameras’ threat to privacy and the nationwide revolt against government mass surveillance as examined in her Nation magazine article, “Cameras Are Everywhere—and People Have Had Enough.”
HANNAH RILEY FERNANDEZ: Flock Safety is an Atlanta-based company. It’s almost a decade old now and they were founded to make ALPRs, so Automatic License Plate Readers, but calling these things license plate readers is like calling my iPhone just a phone. Yes, technically true, but really incomplete. Yes, it makes calls, but it’s also a camera, a map, I can watch movies. There’s a microphone, it’s a record of everything I’ve read and bought and Googled at 2 a.m. Yes, the cameras photograph your license plate, but it also uses AI to log your car’s make, model, your bumper stickers, your roof rack, the dent in your right fender. Flock calls this a vehicle fingerprint. So it means that the system can recognize and follow your car even without reading the plate. These cameras photograph every car that passes, not just suspect, but everyone by default. And I would say that the camera is sort of the least important part of what Flock sells.
Their real product is the database behind it. Every one of these cameras—and there are tens of thousands of them—if you Google what they look like and then start looking around, you’ll start to notice them everywhere. These cameras feed into a nationwide searchable system. So old school plate readers would check your license plate against maybe a list of stolen cars and if there’s no match, forget you. Flock remembers. It pools your movements with everyone else’s and lets basically any police customer—so if they use the system anywhere in the country—search the whole thing. So a cop in a town of 5,000 people can type in a plate and then sweep cameras across 40 states. Or he could search his ex-girlfriend and see where she’s been going. Yeah, it’s not just a license plate reader. It is a private company that has built a national searchable record of where Americans drive, which means where we live, who we hang out with, where we work, where we go to church, where we protest, where we go to get healthcare and then sells access to that.
SCOTT HARRIS: Hannah, the good news in your article, and there is good news here, there’s opposition to this Flock camera system that’s rising up across the country. You write about a whole range of cities, Flagstaff, Arizona; Cambridge, Massachusetts; Evanston, Illinois; Saranac Lake, New York and there are many more where citizens have been activated and become aware of these cameras and their potential for abuse and have demanded their city, their town, the town council, the mayor to oppose or withdraw contracts that these municipalities are in. Tell us about the kind of grassroots organizing that’s been going on under the radar.
HANNAH RILEY FERNANDEZ: This is a bleak time in this country and reporting this piece and thinking about it and talking to all of these people across the country who are really dismantling this surveillance infrastructure did give me a lot of hope, which is something sort of in short supply these days. So activists, organizers, random people who wouldn’t call themselves either of those two things and just care about not being surveilled by their government, I would say a big part of this movement and the resistance to this runs on open records requests. Flock system keeps these audit logs of who searched what and why. And when residents and reporters request these logs, the results have often been radicalizing. This is how 404 Media found that Flock cameras were being used to track a woman who had gotten an abortion in Texas driving across the country. It’s how they found that it was being used to look up folks who ICE was looking for.
There’s been a lot of really creative, cool uses of open records requests that I think anyone can replicate. And then also people are just showing up. They are showing up to city council meetings, to town hall. These contracts that opt into the cameras I think are often aproved in empty rooms and it turns out they can really be killed in full ones. And again, this is across the spectrum, very small rural communities, much larger cities, places that are both red and blue, just ordinary folks finding out, showing up, registering how much they hate the surveillance.
And then one more thing I have to mention because it’s real and growing—is just direct action. People are just taking the cameras out. Flock has in multiple instances now had their contract canceled and then has failed to actually take down the cameras. So people have gone up and put black garbage bags over them. They’ve bashed them, they’ve paint palmed them, they’ve cut them down. And a man in Virginia is actually facing many felonies for allegedly taking down 13 of these cameras.
And he’s arguing in court that the whole system violates the Fourth Amendment. And I think that argument deserves to be taken pretty seriously because cameras track and log and share your movements without a warrant. That is really new and different and scary. There’s no judge involved. There’s no probable cause. There’s no suspicion. It’s just like tracking and surveilling all of us is the default. People see that and they’re fighting back and they’re winning in dozens of cities across the country, which is incredible.
Listen to Scott Harris’ in-depth interview with Hanna Riley Fernandez (23:58) and see more articles and opinion pieces in the related links section of this page. To subscribe to our podcasts, email newsletters, our Trump authoritarian playbook Substack or social media, subscribe here.
