alpr.watch

by theamk • 7 months ago

915 347 7 months ago

ChrisbyMe• 7 months 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• 7 months 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-l...

https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin...

https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA

https://documentcloud.org/add-ons/MuckRock/Klaxon/

https://documentcloud.org/

https://muckrock.com/

phildini14• 7 months 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.

tptacek16• 7 months 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.

phildini14• 7 months 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)

11235813212• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Different datasets. deflock.me is for ALPR locations, alpr.watch shows where local government meetings are taking place

11235813212• 7 months ago

alpr.watch shows camera locations as well as government meetings once you zoom in a bit—the green dots.

snow_mac• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

This video that was posted here yesterday shows some details: 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...

The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.

stronglikedan2• 7 months ago

Try asking. Louis is fairly responsive.

c0brac0bra• 7 months ago

Perhaps something like https://www.perigon.io?

phildini14• 7 months 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

I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: 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.

sodality24• 7 months 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.

therobots9276• 7 months 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.

fooqux2• 7 months 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.

tptacek16• 7 months 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.

sodality24• 7 months 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.

therobots9276• 7 months ago

How did you go about getting the contract canceled? I’m assuming you had to convince the police chief?

Karrot_Kream6• 7 months ago

I don't know. To me this seems like an energized minority trying to use technology to make a lot of noise; much like social media activism. In our city Flock cameras are very controversial but both the PD and transparency reports have shown benefits from Flock. We're not a wealthy, well-to-do suburb though. I imagine heavy ALPR presence is a lot more silly in those areas.

gearhart2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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_bass2• 7 months 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

deepvibrations2• 7 months 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

gearhart2• 7 months ago

Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.

rx_tx• 7 months ago

On the topic of tricking the automated phone usage detection cameras this youtuber had an entertaining video where he built a car phone holder by molding his hand and making a replica.

https://youtu.be/Ud8kFCmalgg

rconti• 7 months ago

There's been increased attention on it here when (from memory), it was found that police departments on the other side of the country were handing over data from completely different jurisdictions' cameras, without any kind of warrant or official order, to third parties.

pseudalopex• 7 months ago

Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia

Our definitions of mass surveillance must differ for you to ask this. Flock cameras are marketed and purchases for mass surveillance expressly.

tptacek16• 7 months ago

That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.

That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.

thinkingemote• 7 months ago

ANPR have been widely used in the UK for at least 25 years. It was first used 32 years ago in 1993 around the City of London.

They were initially deployed without discussion as it would have tipped their hand. The coverage back then was on the main roads around major cities, criminals with enough knowledge could have used minor roads, or used fake plates.

Discussions in the UK in meetings would be about the benefits of them, what arrests the use of ANPR have enabled. Councils have regular scheduled meetings about crime. There would be no real in depth discussion about new ones; that either never happened or happened before many of us (and many of the politicians discussing them!) were born.

ck2• 7 months 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

sodality24• 7 months 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.

rpjt• 7 months ago

There is also no legal "reasonable expectation of privacy" for a license plate displayed on a public road.

klinquist2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

bonestamp22• 7 months ago

Legally, you're absolutely right. But as camera technology, data transmission, data storage, and automated data analysis progress, maybe it's also reasonable that privacy laws progress with the technology. I expect any police officer or other person to freely view my license plate as I drive around and I have no problem with that.

But, I do not think it's reasonable for an automated system to systematically capture, store, and analyze all of my movements (or anyone else who is not suspected of a serious crime). If they suspect I have done something illegal, they should have to get a warrant and then the system can be triggered to start tracking me.

I understand the desire for the data... sometimes I would like to know if my kids are following the rules at home, but I have a stronger conviction that I don't want my kids to grow up in a home where they feel like they are under constant surveillance. It's a gross feeling to be under constant surveillance, like you're living in a panopticon built for prisoners, which is an unfair side effect when you've done nothing wrong. Mass data surveillance of everyone is a totalitarian dystopian that I don't want to live in.

mothballed2• 7 months ago

I'd argue it's a 4A violation to require it to be displayed, though. It's a search of your registration 'papers' without RAS or PC of an offense.

The fact that driving is a 'privilege' doesn't negate your rights to be secure in your papers, the police should have to have articulable suspicion that your car is unregistered or unlicensed before they can demand you to display your plate.

kortex12• 7 months ago

I'm fine with license plates being read and parsed. I'm fine with license plates being read, parsed, assessed for violation, and ticketed automatically, or cross-checked for amber alerts. That's literally my line of work.

I want strict, strict guardrails on when and where that occurs. I want that information erased as soon as the context of the citation wraps up. I want every company/contractor in this space FOIA-able and held to as strict or stricter requirements than the government for transparency and corruption and other regulation. I don't want every timestamped/geostamped datapoint of every law abiding driver passing into any juncture hoovered into a data lake and tracked and easily queryable. That's (IMHO, IANAL, WTF, BBQ) a flagrant 4th amendment violation, and had the framers been able to conceive such a thing, they'd absolutely add a "and no dragnet surveilance" provision from day 1.

If that seems hypocritical, my line starts with "has a crime occurred with decent likelihood?" "Lets collect everything and go snoopin for crimes" is beyond the pale.

klinquist2• 7 months ago

1. Government having the data is different than private companies having the data

2. Consent

3. Accountability (e.g. A government agency needs a warrant to use your cell phone location data against you).

graemep• 7 months ago

Google+Apple stores have your location as the apps are always on in the background

Does that imply that Android settings lie about which apps have accessed location data?

artifaxx2• 7 months ago

Tracking already feeling pervasive suffers from the cognitive bias of all or nothing thinking. A phone can be turned off or apps disabled far more easily than a network of surveillance cameras. There are degrees of surveillance and who has access to the data. We can push back.

lutusp• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

bonestamp22• 7 months ago

Maybe it's one of those situations where it takes a good guy using surveillance to take down a bad guy using surveillance?

buellerbueller2• 7 months 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_Edging2• 7 months 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.

gs173• 7 months 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.

immibis2• 7 months ago

It's 1938.

When nazis kill jews that is bad.

When jews kill nazis that is good (arguably (it used to be obvious but now it is only arguable)).

Symmetric situations are not equivalent.

ZebusJesus• 7 months 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/investigat...

p_ing8• 7 months ago

Unfortunately they haven't disabled them in all locales.

travisgriggs• 7 months 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.

buellerbueller2• 7 months ago

Surround the homes of the politicians and billionaires, and you're onto something. Better yet, make them publicly viewable webcams.

jkestner2• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

I specifically have considered this in terms of protecting workers from (otherwise private or hidden) workplace abuse.

koolala• 7 months ago

AR / AI glasses will be this.

1515529• 7 months ago

Facial recognition databases of public sector employees will be the straw that breaks this camel's back.

kortex12• 7 months ago

It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.

The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.

rootusrootus4• 7 months ago

Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.

I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?

We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.

plandis• 7 months ago

This only works if society was okay with surveillance on private property. The wealthy can afford large tracts of private land and can afford to send people on their behalf to interact in public for many things. They can pay services to come to them as well.

wombatpm• 7 months ago

If the wealthy want to hide away in a prison of their own choice I’m ok with that. What I don’t like are the wealthy using their wealth to take over public spaces. Like using Venice for a private wedding.

1515529• 7 months ago

The "wealthy" can't control the FAA or obtain TFRs (look no further than the issues Elon and Taylor Swift have had with obfuscating their jet registration), so they're basically fucked when it comes to preventing aerial video observation over private property unless this "large tract of private land" exists within 14nm of Washington D.C. (these types of tracts aren't practically obtainable there) or falls within an existing flight-restricted zone (which aren't typically permanent.)

bitexploder11• 7 months ago

I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)

p_ing8• 7 months ago

There is a sign put up by the county on a downward hill with some nice curves in it. It _used_ to display your speed but that was removed in favor of just flashing "Slow Down" once people used it to see how fast they could navigate the bends.

kortex12• 7 months ago

Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.

Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).

Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.

varenc2• 7 months ago

If you're in CA, I learned recently that any use of automatic license plate recognition here is regulated and has a bunch of rules. Technically just turning on the ALPR feature in your consumer level camera is illegal if you don't also do things like post a public notice with your usage and privacy policy.

The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...

AdamJacobMuller• 7 months ago

I'm curious what does your hardware/software stack look like for your ALPR system?

hypercube33• 7 months ago

Look up the YouTube on project Argus that uses drone cameras in like 2010 or something. every moving object inside a city is classified, identified and tracked in and out of buildings, cars and that's just the declassified part. I've talked to people who've told me or shown me a lot more wild systems they've built for retail decades ago to track user product interactions then tied it to loyalty and credit cards so they know what you looked at vs purchased and how long and mood age etc just from video. tie all that to public data or purchased or given data and it's basically game over for being anonymous.

EvanAnderson3• 7 months ago

I have similar, albeit probably more radical, views.

All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public. (Targeted surveillance by law enforcement is a different thing.)

We should all be able to "profit" from this data collected about us. There are likely a ton of interesting applications that could come from this data.

I would much rather independently run a "track my stalker" application myself versus relying on law enforcement (who have no duty to protect the public in the US, per SCOTUS) to "protect" me, for example.

It might be that such a panopticon would be unpalatable to political leaders and, ideally, we'd see some action to tamp down the use of dragnet surveillance (and maybe even make it illegal).

psc• 7 months ago

You may want to check out David Brin's work, he covers the implications of this idea extensively in The Transparent Society: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society

I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.

1515529• 7 months ago

All dragnet surveillance done by law enforcement or given to law enforcement by private entities should be public

You can FOIA the cameras outside your local police station today, if you like. Private company data like Flock's is the new grey area.

octoberfranklin• 7 months ago

Hrm, I read and loved Rainbows End but must have totally missed this. What was the experiment?

FWIW, what I want is the non-IME/PSP "¡hecho en Paraguay!" chips from the book.

atomicthumbs• 7 months ago

not really, because all the sousveillance in the world doesn't grant the average joe the power of a single cop

kortex12• 7 months 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-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)

tptacek16• 7 months ago

Fair warning that this is a deeply unpopular argument in municipal politics.

therobots9276• 7 months 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.

fooqux2• 7 months ago

I think that's kinda the point?

If public servants funded by taxpayers don't like it, maybe they shouldn't be forcing it on the populace and breaking the forth amendment.

cons0le• 7 months ago

I don't want to live in a zero-crime world

That's about the worst, most inflammatory way possible to make your point. I agree with you 100%, but I am begging you to learn to frame your ideas better, in order to get people on your side. If you say that to any voters you will lose them instantly

kortex12• 7 months ago

Noted. But I'm trying to make people think about their cognitive dissonance.

I'm not a politician. I'm a systems thinker. If someone can't reason their way through what a "zero-crime world" actually entails, I doubt my other ideas will get through to them. Zero crime. Zero. No speeding, no IP infringement, no "just this one time". Zero.

That's also why I like asking "why stop there?" We've basically solved surveilance. It's an engineering problem. We have the capacity to track everyone (who does not make a VERY concerted effort to stealth) all the time, almost everywhere.

artifaxx2• 7 months ago

Didn't lose me, but point taken about gathering more support. How about: the costs of implementing a zero-crime world are far greater than the crime. Or attempting to trade freedom for safety will result in losing both.

immibis2• 7 months ago

Zero-crime means zero things that are banned ever becoming allowed. Things usually become allowed after they are illegal first, but people do them anyway, and then people wonder why we bother punishing them. Think of marijuana legalization. If nobody ever tried to illegally smoke weed, it would never be legalized because there would be no perceived benefit to doing so because it would be obvious that nobody wanted to do it.

jandrese• 7 months ago

While true, I think you have missed the bigger story. If you talk with kids today their mentality is very different from kids of 20-30 years ago, and it's not the cop cameras all over the place. Nobody pays those much mind. It's the fact that damn near everybody over the age of 10 is carrying around a high quality camera all day long and the means to publish that footage worldwide in an instant. It doesn't help that people with an agenda sometimes call for other people to be "cancelled" over even a single video, even a 30 year old video from when they were freshmen in college, and are can be successful in getting that person's life ruined.

We're living constantly in the scene from Fahrenheit 451 where the government asks everybody to go outside at once and report any suspicious activity. We have made it potentially not OK for kids to push boundaries or make mistakes.

fainpul2• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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...)

gs173• 7 months 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

Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.

fainpul2• 7 months 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.

FelipeCortez2• 7 months ago

I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.

FelipeCortez2• 7 months ago

found it! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Faceless_(2007_film)

geoffeg• 7 months ago

Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.

rvloock• 7 months ago

Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .

p_ing8• 7 months ago

I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera.

Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.

arijun• 7 months ago

I wonder if it’s legal to modify the images to look more sinister. Otherwise, someone passing by might not read the text, making it free advertising for council/sherrif.

edot• 7 months ago

The issue is, a lot of people wouldn’t mind the sheriff knowing where their wife and daughter are at all times. What if one of them gets kidnapped? It would be good if law enforcement could track them. That’s the logic some people have …

allenu• 7 months ago

Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...

renewiltord2• 7 months ago

That's not face recognition. That's face detection. It just detects faces and sticks a label from a pre-selected list. Come on, this doesn't even pass the basic smell test. "Facial recognition" my ass. It doesn't recognize anyone. I could build this in a cave with scraps. There's a huge difference between the two: recognition means you have found a known person, detection means you found a person.

That's about the difference between eating sodium chloride and eating sodium.

iris-digital• 7 months ago

I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.

tefkah• 7 months ago

damn that’s a good idea

basch• 7 months ago

I see a meeting tonight in a neighboring city with a council recommendation of approve. Timely

calvinmorrison• 7 months ago

A better "art project" would be a alpr that detects police and municipal vehicles and reports them to a map criminals and citizens alike can see

hopelite2• 7 months ago

Joke's on you... even most EVs watch everyone and everything that they pass/passes them. Walking through the parking lot ... face recognition.

Welcome to prison planet, the silly conspiracy theory that only weirdos believe in 1990.

DANmode2• 7 months ago

…wait, what about 1990?

rsync3• 7 months ago

"... and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots ..."

This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.

Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.

Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.

You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.

[1] https://0x.co

achierius• 7 months ago

But people's phones will scan a QR code from the camera: they're much more likely to do that then type in a URL while walking.

hamburglar• 7 months ago

So 0x.co is tinyurl for strings?

cinntaile• 7 months ago

You can't scan them like a QR-code, which is kind of the point?

ihaveone• 7 months ago

They should make a tiny encoded image to save too. Typing something isn't as fast as point and shoot.

imglorp• 7 months ago

There's probably several interesting ways to make a QR code on the ground with chalk. I'm thinking of a turtle bot loaded with spray chalk, for starters.

And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...

nemo1618• 7 months ago

Years ago there was a YouTuber, "Surveillance Camera Man," who went around pointing a camera at people with no pretense. Frequently the subjects were upset by this and became aggressive, even violent. I believe the intended message was that this is a natural and justified reaction to being surveilled, and yet there is little outcry because public surveillance is largely invisible and/or faceless (e.g. just a CCTV camera mounted on a building, rather than a stranger invading your personal space).

The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...

xmprt2• 7 months ago

My take on that is that they're different situations because a CCTV camera has 1000s of hours of footage to scrub through and will likely only be looked at if/when something bad happens. Whereas the guy pointing a camera at me probably only has a couple hours which means I'm likely relevant to the cameraman (ie, I'll go into that final video) whereas I'm not that relevant to the CCTV.

I know more recent cameras are using AI analysis to constantly track and catalog people which is more worrying but the old school surveillance cameras don't bother me as much.

I like the OP's idea for an art project more because it's showing your what is really happening (rather than convincing people that filming someone on a 4k camera is the same as CCTV surveillance) - CCTV cameras are constantly monitoring and many can be publicly accessed.

Terr_• 7 months 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.

phildini14• 7 months ago

This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)

ZeWaka2• 7 months ago

Seem to be getting 405s from https://civic.observer/auth/login

And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html

phildini14• 7 months ago

Fixed the 404s on civic.band, thanks

kpw94• 7 months 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)

phildini14• 7 months ago

Thanks for asking!

- The framework for crawling is open-source. 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-• 7 months 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

mdnahas• 7 months ago

Also missing: Austin, TX

phildini14• 7 months ago

Hello! The crawlers are not currently public, but I'm happy to take volunteers behind the curtain.

I also fixed Cook County

tonymet• 7 months ago

very cool can you check the login page i'm getting error 405 on

https://civic.observer/auth/login

I am interested in monitoring local legislation in Clark County, WA

staffordrj• 7 months 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

first the came for the turkeys...

ZeWaka2• 7 months ago

We have had deer on our ring camera shown jumping over our fence into our backyard. This is very alarming.

heavyset_go• 7 months ago

Parks & Rec was a documentary

phildini14• 7 months 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• 7 months 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_• 7 months ago

asdf

tptacek16• 7 months ago

We do not in fact have "massive police budgets". In most munis, the biggest ticket expense, by far, is schools.

stuffn2• 7 months 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_• 7 months 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.

stuffn2• 7 months ago

The thing is every thing I listed is also used by law enforcement. There is nothing stopping them from turning everything into a dragnet. We already know they use ring cameras, cell phones, tower data, etc to build a dragnet. Flock is just another player.

To be honest flock seem like the perfect distraction from the larger surveillance state we live in. I feel like most of the writing I have seen on this acts like this some new, disgusting, pervasive thing. The truth is law enforcement has been using everything available because there’s nothing stopping them from subpoenaing or straight buying the data.

The larger problem is law enforcement needs to be curtailed (good luck unless we bust their union which the pro-union left won’t do), and then cameras need to be removed from phones and homes.

a4564635• 7 months ago

Just saying, this isn't said in bad faith, doesn't make it so.

SilentM68• 7 months ago

This is a very useful site :)

lapetitejort4• 7 months 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_ing8• 7 months 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• 7 months 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-ru...

lapetitejort4• 7 months ago

Reducing unnecessarily bulky trucks with low visibility, increasing fuel efficiencies, and removing gas subsidies absolutely helps the suburban and rural population

jimberlage• 7 months ago

So half the population would benefit? Half the population is more than enough reason to do all that and more.

therobots9276• 7 months ago

They could also be easily tracked without cameras.

ronnier2• 7 months ago

I do everything I can to avoid public transportation. It's not worth the risk or the annoyances with aggressive and dangerous people. If I lived in Asia (which I did before), I'd love to use public transportation because the people are not aggressive, won't attack or kill me. That's not the case in the USA

lapetitejort4• 7 months ago

Most of the places within public transportation range are also within biking range, so I prefer biking. The end result is the same: one less car off the road.

Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.

JuniperMesos• 7 months ago

People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.

The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).

I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.

Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.

gs173• 7 months ago

and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies

If you're lucky. Sometimes you just get anti-car. I'd love to not need a car at all, but where I am now it would mean Ubering instead because they've made driving worse while transit isn't expanded to fit the gap.

Karrot_Kream6• 7 months ago

There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can spend a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.

The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.

I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.

tptacek16• 7 months ago

I don't think it's a growth in drivers as much as it is a shift in policing away from traffic enforcement, something that's only gradually being unwound as people realize how much they hate lax traffic enforcement.

deadfall23• 7 months 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• 7 months 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_zamoyski2• 7 months 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_ing8• 7 months 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.

Karrot_Kream6• 7 months ago

Here's an interesting hypothetical: if we don't trust law enforcement to operate these things, then consequently we don't trust law enforcement to enforce laws in a more physical manner (which is pretty true given 2020 protests against police brutality), then how do we enforce laws?

(This is a hypothetical because obviously in reality there's no easy philosophical through line from ideas to policy.)

rcpt• 7 months ago

Can't wait to get out to these meetings and advocate for more speed cameras and red light cameras.

garyfirestorm2• 7 months 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?

phildini14• 7 months 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.

1515529• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

There are usually laws against making your plate unreadable to plate readers if the readers are used for tolling. Florida is one example.

stronglikedan2• 7 months ago

good luck with that in some states, like Florida

1515529• 7 months 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.

garyfirestorm2• 7 months ago

I like your idea. I would prefer nondestructive methods of scrambling their ability to read.

t1234s• 7 months ago

I think this is how they are going to roll out tax-by-the-mile schemes across the US.

MagicMoonlight• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Does America not have data protection laws that prevent this sort of sharing?

LazyMans2• 7 months 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.

IlikeKitties3• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

SchemaLoad2• 7 months ago

For most people. Your human right to not be shot sits above your right to drive anonymously.

guelo• 7 months ago

Missing Oakland. There's no where to submit anything as far as I can tell.

phildini14• 7 months ago

I don't work with them right now but maybe this will help? https://oakland.ca.civic.band/-/search?q=flock

celeryd• 7 months ago

Are these meetings truly constrained to the continental US?

phildini14• 7 months 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...

I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/

a4564635• 7 months ago

Ring! Please stop Ring cameras.... Ugh!!!

girvo3• 7 months 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).

1515529• 7 months 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.

1515529• 7 months ago

This is the United States of America: I'm allowed to report on the activity going on in public outside of my property, and you need to amend the Constitution if you'd like to legally prohibit that.

almosthere3• 7 months 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• 7 months 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?

SchemaLoad2• 7 months 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.

pickledonions492• 7 months 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?

almosthere3• 7 months 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.

mlsu3• 7 months ago

Why stop at the public? Crimes are committed in private too, you know. I have an idea — let’s increase the scope of surveillance to private activities as well. If everyone is surveilled, then really, no individual person is surveilled, right? This only works if we install surveillance everywhere though, with no exceptions.

almosthere3• 7 months ago

Because that's not what I'm for. Goal post shifter. A lot of crimes people travel to a private location by going through public places. Perhaps when we have Star Trek transporters we'll need to go in that direction.

Which is actually a thing in Star Trek - they literally solve crimes by tracking exactly where people are and check transporter logs for where people go.

dkalola• 7 months 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?

1515529• 7 months ago

Yes, but these are laws that "I don't agree with," therefore they can be ignored. Who will pick our crops!?

zer0x4d2• 7 months 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.

tkzed492• 7 months 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.

1515529• 7 months 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.

Verlyn1392• 7 months ago

average HN respose, bunch of boomers

exceptione• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

How are you monitoring the meeting minutes? Would you open source this?

snigsnog• 7 months ago

Systems marketed for "solving crimes" get used for immigration enforcement

So for solving crimes.

I'm in favor, then!

bichiliad4• 7 months 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.

1515529• 7 months 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.

atymic• 7 months ago

Clicked a random one and it's a document about a flock of ducks :-) https://www.gtwp.com/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Minutes/_10222025...

lukeinator42• 7 months 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."

gsibble• 7 months ago

If you think privacy exists in any real capacity anymore, you're a moron.

owlninja• 7 months 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...

bichiliad4• 7 months 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?

tptacek16• 7 months 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• 7 months 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• 7 months 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.

squigz• 7 months ago

I wish opponents would realize this more - that there are very legitimate use-cases for stuff like this, to be actually helpful and used to improve society.

What I wish proponents would accept is that it won't just be used for those use-cases.

It's not an easy situation, especially when you consider the myriad other issues that feed into this.

Unfortunately, as much as I empathize with your position, as long as there is so much potential for abuse, and so long as trust in public institutions continues to erode, I cannot support stuff like this.

Verlyn1392• 7 months ago

The state of this thread lol, buch of trump bootlickers, i hope he go to hell soon

jmward012• 7 months 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.

phildini14• 7 months ago

Hi there! I've built the beginnings of this platform at https://civic.band and 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!

jmward012• 7 months ago

Thanks! I'll give it a look

throwaranay4933• 7 months ago

https://www.civicsearch.org/ pulls city council transcripts from YouTube etc

stackedinserter• 7 months 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.

LazyMans2• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

As a Korean, this is hilarious

mnau2• 7 months ago

Why? Is Korea at UK-level dystopia nightmare?

schoen• 7 months 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) 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• 7 months ago

We need that for Europe, too.

spencerflem• 7 months ago

I would pay a hundred thousand dollars to get a 24/7 video feed of Peter Thiel

unkulunkulu• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

I, for one, welcome surveillance.

csmpltn• 7 months ago

The goal is to intimidate criminals, and mitigate crime. What’s wrong with that?

calcifer• 7 months ago

Honestly, "if you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to worry about" is a juvenile take in a post-Snowden world.

petargyurov• 7 months ago

You aren't the one deciding what is a crime and what isn't.

3D304974202• 7 months 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-surveilla... (Many more can be found with a quick Google search.)

sneak• 7 months 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• 7 months ago

Surveillance of the surveillants to prevent the surveilled

ponker• 7 months 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-r...

rhgraysonii• 7 months ago

Is the site open source?

I see some issues in the map display I would like to fix.

avipars• 7 months ago

There are some false positives, https://cityofmidlandmi.gov/AgendaCenter/ViewFile/Agenda/_10...

Mentions "flock" when referring to a flock of turkeys - not flock cameras

reboot_boom• 7 months ago

Similar but different project: https://sunders.uber.space

Surveillance under Surveillance shows you cameras and guards — watching you — almost everywhere.

alpr.watch

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