Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete.
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".
There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers.
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law.
Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.
Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party.
Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete
It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools.
Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.
I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
Put up billboards around metros with a license plate reader that queries this database with each passing car and announce "White Tesla Model Y XYZ-1234 You've been focked for: Inv"
Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.
"Flock Safety" is a company that makes "ALPR" cameras (automated license plate recognition, in reality they go far beyond just reading license plates), they've been getting a lot of attention recently because people are worried about privacy and abuse.
That website is a bit misleading, their "worldwide" map includes ALL ALPR cameras, not just the ones operated by Flock or for-profit surveillance companies.
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
ANPR cameras which the rest of the world (and apparently America) have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
I think it's mostly just a privacy issue. The idea that your every movement is being recorded by the government is Orwellian, especially when they try to hide its existence, lie about its capabilities, and you have no say in the matter (referencing NSA metadata monitoring). The average person thinks their ring camera is like their coffee maker, an individual piece of technology they own and control. If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too.
It’s trivial for law enforcement to track your movement with ALPR cameras. Information feeds into a single database, paid for by law enforcement agencies, and they just connect the dots.
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
> have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state.
They’ve gotten cheaper and aggregated into nationwide networks. The older devices were expensive and in police car scenarios required pretty significant effort to install. The mobile flock just gets bolted to the dash.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unless I'm missing something, Ring cameras film people at my doorstep and are for my personal use, so dont know how they're similar at all even if you don't trust Amazon
Americans (the general public) are a lot more weary of government surveillance than other developed nations. Its one thing that you can get a lot of liberals and conservative to agree on.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.
I love these kinds of sites, since they're indistinguishable from honeypots. Sure, have my license plate and the information that I'm worried about being watched.
> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII.
Suppose the guy behind this website keeps a log of the requests, even accidentally, and eventually gets bought out by Flock themselves (websites critical of companies selling out is unfortunately common). Now Flock has a list of plates of people alert to flock and this gets added to your Palintir threat matrix, so the next time a cop pulls you over for some minor infraction his computer can prime him to be jumpy and trigger happy by labelling you as a potential dissident.
I totally understand your sentiment, but you could just check a random assortment of license plate numbers you collected while driving around, which also includes yours. At the very least that would effectively obfuscate your license plate sufficiently that it could not be attributed beyond other methods that likely already have done so.
Some are installed on private property, and supply data to the property owner. Some are installed on public property, and supply data to the government.
Hello, we at Flock are very sad to announce that your data was leaked, but due to the fact that we operate in a legal grey area to get around laws and are nothing more than the domestic surveillance equivalent to a PMC operating overseas, we invite you get fucked
Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.
Why should I care if some low-ranking party official in China knows where I drive, when my actual government will use that data to deport me if I sufficiently piss it off?
Readit News
But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
* Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs
* We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet
What a sick society we live in.
Deleted Comment
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
edit: grammar
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
Dead Comment
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
> If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50
Deleted Comment
Dead Comment
https://deflock.me/map
Do they get permission or permit to install them?
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.