Speed Traps or Spy Traps

You all know that I don't like speed cameras. It is not that I speed, but rather the fact that is you are not aware of the speeding ticket until a month later. Suppose you are keeping up with traffic and you go that way every day to work. By that time you collected ten ot twenty more tickets!!!!

The Hartford Courant writes;

From the time the camera went live in July through December 2025, the department issued about 46,000 citations for the same area. As of early December, the department had collected $1.84 million in fines out of a total of $2.8 million issued, according to Costa.

Once you know it's there, you slow down. But the person passing through doesn’t, and they just made the town and the camera company another $50. That is why towns love these cameras: they bring in tons of money by "socking it" to out-of-towners. The delay between the act of speeding and receiving the ticket—which can be weeks—proves these aren't meant to curb speeding in real-time; they are meant to generate revenue.

The towns have contracted with a variety of vendors to provide the cameras and software. A purchase order from August 2024 shows that Middletown paid about $3,900 to the firm Traffic Logix for a speed camera. The town paid $4,000 to Dacra Tech for the camera’s operating system and will also pay the firm a monthly fee based on the number of citations and warnings issued: $13.50 per citation and $6 per warning.

It is a massive money-maker for both the town and the private companies. The towns are seeing $$dollar$$ signs!

Although Connecticut’s law strictly regulates the way data collected by speed and red light cameras can be used, Dan Barrett, the legal director of the ACLU of Connecticut, said the organization is concerned about their use.

“The pervasive surveillance means that so much more evil is possible,” Barrett said.

State law mandates that any data collected by speed or red light cameras can only be used to track those violations. It can’t be used, for example, to track someone who has committed a crime.

Still, some municipal officials, while assessing the need for the cameras, have expressed concerns about potential collateral effects.

Whew! I thought that ICE could see the data, but it looks like we have laws in place to stop that!

However, the camera companies are thumbing their noses at the laws! Back in 2019 the ACLU wrote about the cameras in the article, Documents Reveal ICE Using Driver Location Data From Local Police for Deportations;

Records obtained by the ACLU of Northern California in a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit detail ICE’s sweeping use of a vast automated license plate reader (ALPR) database run by a company called Vigilant Solutions. Over 9,000 ICE officers have gained access to the Vigilant system under a $6.1 million contract that the public first learned of last year. ICE has access to over 5 billion data points of location information collected by private businesses, like insurance companies and parking lots, and can gain access to an additional 1.5 billion records collected by law enforcement agencies.

Over 80 local law enforcement agencies, from over a dozen states, have agreed to share license plate location information with ICE. Emails show local police handing driver information over to ICE informally, violating local law and ICE policies.

The ACLU’s grave concerns about the civil liberties risks of license plate readers take on greater urgency as this surveillance information fuels ICE’s deportation machine. Many communities have license plate readers: high-speed cameras mounted on police cars, road signs, or bridges that can photograph every passing license plate. Together with time, date, and location coordinates, the information is stored for years, generating a literal and intimate roadmap of people’s private lives. Vigilant also sells ALPR systems to local police and hosts location information collected by law enforcement and private companies in a massive database called LEARN.

In an article this month the sharing has even gotten more pervasive!

Santa Cruz leaders vote to terminate contract with Flock

Santa Cruz

By B. Sakura Cannestra

January 13, 2026 

Santa Cruz City Council voted 6-1 on Tuesday to end its contract with license plate camera company Flock Safety, but left the door open for a possible replacement.

The Atlanta, Georgia-based surveillance company Flock Safety has come under fire after reports surfaced that license plate data from Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville have been accessed by outside agencies on behalf of federal law enforcement, including U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE. 

Vice Mayor Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson and Councilmembers Susie O’Hara and Renee Golder proposed the contract termination, citing rising tensions with ICE, and weak trust in the company following Flock’s lackluster response to the data breaches. Councilmember Sonja Brunner was the sole dissenting vote. 

The Center for Human Rights at the University of Washington reports...

Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement

Summary

• Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) networks have become increasingly common in Washington state.
• Records obtained by UWCHR researchers via public records requests reveal that at least eight Washington state law enforcement agencies enabled direct, 1:1 sharing of their networks with U.S. Border Patrol at some point during 2025; effectively opening the “front door” for searches potentially related to civil immigration enforcement activities.
• Flock audits reveal apparent “back door” access by U.S. Border Patrol to the networks of at least ten Washington police departments which did not explicitly authorize Border Patrol searches of their network data.
• Flock audits reveal limited cases of law enforcement agencies in Washington state conducting “side door” searches on behalf of federal immigration enforcement agencies, as well as numerous similar searches by other law enforcement agencies nationwide with access to Flock networks in Washington state.
• Discrepancies between Flock audits and other documentation make it impossible for independent researchers to determine the current scope of local organizations’ access and exposure to searches by other Flock users nationwide.

ICE is creating a surveillance network that rivals authoritarian counties like North Korea!

Consider the reality for the trans community today. Connecticut is supposed to be a "safe harbor" state, but these camera networks don't respect borders. Imagine a District Attorney from a hostile state like Texas running a search for every vehicle with Texas plates parked near a gender clinic in New Haven. With one click, they have a list of targets to prosecute. Our local streets are being turned into a dragnet for out-of-state "bounty hunter" laws.

If a Texas DA wants to find out who is visiting a clinic in New Haven, they don't have to talk to a Connecticut judge. They simply log into the national database provided by companies like Flock or Vigilant. Since the data is hosted on servers in Georgia or California, they can bypass Connecticut's "safe harbor" protections entirely.

It is time to enforce our state laws. We cannot allow our local police to hand over data that puts people’s lives and healthcare at risk. We need to cancel these contracts and hit these companies where it hurts: their bottom line. If we don’t, we are allowing our towns to build a totalitarian infrastructure that ICE and out-of-state prosecutors will use to hunt the most vulnerable among us.