I'm heading up to the Cape today... so it is prewritten blogs today!
So, have the feds handed over their "Big Brother" surveillance to private companies?
Insider InvestigatorKatherine RevelloJuly 12, 2026Connecticut has the highest per capita rate of automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras in New England and across other northeastern states, including New York, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey.According to DeFlock, Connecticut ranks twenty-fifth overall for the number of per capita cameras in the state, averaging roughly 1.78 cameras per 10,000 residents.Those cameras are maintained by a variety of police departments and private businesses and use artificial intelligence to take pictures of and ‘read’ the license plate and make and model characteristics of every vehicle that goes past. The cameras can be either mounted to roadside infrastructure, like a pole or traffic light, or in the dashboard of a police car.Every plate read is dumped into a massive database law enforcement can search and check against various crime hotlists. The majority of the data collected and stored is not connected to a crime and is never searched for or viewed by police before it’s purged from the system, often after a 30-day retention period.
That database involves the entire Flock network. As the quote notes, "Every plate read is dumped into a massive database law enforcement can search and check against various crime hotlists." But the problem is that there are errors in this database. Basically, these are warrantless searches!
The Electronic Freedom Foundation writes;
Imagine driving to get your nails done with your family and all of a sudden, you are pulled over by police officers for allegedly driving a stolen car. You are dragged out of the car and detained at gun point. So are your daughter, sister, and nieces. The police handcuff your family, even the children, and force everyone to lie face-down on the pavement, before eventually realizing that they made a mistake. This happened to Brittney Gilliam and her family on a warm Sunday in Aurora, Colorado, in August 2020.And the error? The police officers who pulled them over were relying on information generated by automated license plate readers (ALPRs). These are high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, upload them to a central server, and compare them to a “hot list” of vehicles sought by police. The ALPR system told the police that Gilliam’s car had the same license plate number as a stolen vehicle. But the stolen vehicle was a motorcycle with Montana plates, while Gilliam’s vehicle was an SUV with Colorado plates.
Couple that with gun-happy ICE agents, and it spells disaster!
Police over-reliance on ALPR systems is also a problem. Detroit police knew that the vehicle used in a shooting was a Dodge Charger. Officers then used ALPR cameras to find the license plate numbers of all Dodge Chargers in the area around the time. One such car, observed fully two miles away from the shooting, was owned by Isoke Robinson. Police arrived at her house and handcuffed her, placed her 2-year old son in the back of their patrol car, and impounded her car for three weeks. None of the officers even bothered to check her car’s fog lights, though the vehicle used for the shooting had a missing fog light.Officers have also abused ALPR databases to obtain information for their own personal gain, for example, to stalk an ex-wife. Sadly, officer abuse of police databases is a recurring problem.
In my town there are twelve reported cameras.
The Institute for Justice also found problems with the data.
But those machine errors account for about one-third of the mistakes in the cases IJ identified. The rest involved human error, with officers entering wrong information into the system or misinterpreting what the ALPR data says.Last year in San Diego, for instance, officers were searching for a red Alfa Romeo connected to an attempted carjacking. The officers didn’t have a plate and were instead relying on Flock’s “vehicle signature” technology, which captures detailed characteristics of individual cars like make, model, and color.The Flock system gave them a positive hit on a superficially matching car—but it was a totally different red Alfa Romeo, located five miles away from the crime at the time it occurred. Officers nevertheless arrested all three of the car’s occupants. One passenger spent nearly a month behind bars during the holidays before officers realized their error and set him free.
People lives are at stake... there can be no false reporting!
People's lives are at stake—there can be no false reporting!
Also, there have been a number of cases where the police used the data to track ex-girlfriends. The Institute for Justice in another article reported;
An ongoing review of media reports and public records by the Institute for Justice has identified at least 24 cases nationwide of officers allegedly abusing ALPR data this way, with the bulk of those incidents happening since 2024. Nearly all of these officers were criminally charged and lost their jobs, either by resigning or getting fired.Flock Safety and other ALPR providers emphasize that they have internal safeguards to prevent this kind of misuse. But only a few of the 24 analyzed cases were initially discovered through internal investigations, according to media reports. Most incidents came to light only after victims reported the officers’ behavior to the police, typically in the context of a broader stalking allegation.“The fundamental problem with these systems is that they place private information about people’s movements over time in the hands of every officer,” said Michael Soyfer, an Institute for Justice attorney who is representing residents of San Jose and Norfolk in lawsuits challenging their cities’ ALPR surveillance networks. “Without the constitutional safeguard of a warrant requirement, that predictably allows officers to abuse their access to these systems for things like stalking romantic partners.”
In an article in the Courthouse News they write;
In a lawsuit, two California drivers have accused tech company Flock Safety of violating state law by allowing out-of-state and federal agencies to access information captured by its automated license-plate recognition (ALPR) cameras.“Flock has created an Orwellian mass-surveillance infrastructure that is practically impossible to avoid, particularly for anyone operating a vehicle in the towns and cities across this country where Flock has installed its cameras,” the drivers say in their complaint, filed Thursday in state court in San Francisco.“Flock attempts to evade responsibility and shift liability for its violations by pointing fingers at its own customers,” they claim. “But Flock cannot rely on weaponized incompetence when its obligations under California law are crystal clear.”
They go on to write that various police agencies go around the law by search the databases at the request of ICE and CPB.
The Mountain View Police Department, the plaintiffs say, discovered only recently that federal agencies accessed its cameras’ data through a nationwide search tool. They say this feature was enabled without the police department’s permission or knowledge.In recent months, the cities of Santa Cruz, Richmond, Mountain View and Los Altos Hills all shut down Flock cameras or terminated their contracts, according to the drivers.Last October, California Attorney General Rob Bonta sued the city of El Cajon over its refusal to comply with state law prohibiting the sharing of license plate data with federal and out-of-state law enforcement agencies.
Here in Connecticut they tried to pass a law but it never made it to the floor of the legislature last session. In the bill HB 5449: AN ACT CONCERNING AUTOMATED LICENSE PLATE READER SYSTEMS, and it states...
108 (5) Unless authorized pursuant to section 29-6d of the general109 statutes, collect automated license plate reader data on the premises or110 within a distance established by the Police Officer Standards and111 Training Council pursuant to section 2 of this act, of a reproductive or112 sexual health facility, as defined in section 42-515 of the general statutes,113 that primarily provides gender-affirming health care services or a114 nonprofit or community organization that primarily serves immigrant115 communities, excluding any property under federal jurisdiction,116 provided such facility or organization notified the Police Officer117 Standards and Training Council of such facility's or organization's118 location;
You have to wonder if this is ultimately just a clever way to bypass the Fourth Amendment. After all, it is no longer the government directly collecting your personal data—it is a private company doing the legwork, which then sells access right back to government agencies. When private corporations build massive, unregulated tracking databases that police departments simply "subscribe" to, it creates a dangerous constitutional gray area.
These are, indeed, the new shades of Big Brother.
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