But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES".
That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement.
Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."
at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete
It's not a dataset of license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras. It's a dataset of license plate numbers that have been entered into search tools. Enter a license plate to see if it's one of the 2,207,426 plates seen in the 27,177,268 Flock searches we know about.The search logs are public record even when alpr data is not; quite a few come from IL.
Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.
* Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs Records requests can take months or years to fulfill Some agencies heavily redact their logs
* We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet
What a sick society we live in.
There's a bunch of articles about them here: https://www.404media.co/tag/flock/
edit: grammar
The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Automatic_number-plate_recogni...
I'm not sure why these are so bad but generally everyone loves things like Ring cameras which do the same thing but with people rather than vehicles. I suspect there's something in the American Psyche and how they treat cars, and the inherent trust of the billionaires and distrust of "The Feds"
Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.
Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.
That is one aspect.
But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?
Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.
Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".
And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.
In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.
Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.
> If you are owner of this website, prevent this from happening again by upgrading your plan on the Cloudflare Workers dashboard.
For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.
Here's what I would do working off just a single license plate number w OSINT.
I would pivot immediately into license plate databases that have been breached. For example, ParkMobile got popped in 2021 and the db has 20.9M license plates in it. prob have low success rate and iirc its pretty US centric. It has their full name, address, phone, email, all kinda data.
If you had paid fancy tools, like Lexis Nexis, you could plug it into there and easily find the owner.
There are also plenty of license plate look sites online where it will tell you the VIN and make/model details.
Idk, would just take digging and keep spidering out with all new info you find. Would yield a few hits eventually.
Put in your name, address, phone number, dob, ssn and bank details - we will post you a cheque for $2.50
“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.
What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.
I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.
See Mosaic + Carpenter case which say “Yes, each scan is public; yes, aggregation is different. "
Carpenter shows the Court recognizes that aggregated location data can be constitutionally significant.
Individual observability vs. systemic observation: A passerby can note a single plate at a single place/time. But a system of ALPRs, distributed spatially and continuous in time, indexed and retained, can map a person’s entire movements, associations, repeated visits, and behavioral patterns. That’s exactly the “mosaic” insight: the whole reveals things the pieces don’t. (Maynard / Jones reasoning).
You can buy local or do it yourself, but all of those are squeezed at the margins by enshittified inputs.
Before even seeking to fix the problem, I try to work on me.
First, I try (difficult) to not be sucked into useless wallowing, which keeps me exactly where the enemy wants me to be. I tend to skim 'news' headlines now, if that.
Second, in my career I strive to produce uncommon quality so as to not add to the problem.
I love to stand out and feel proud of my work. It makes me sad when coworkers are concerned/confused when I put in extra effort. I know where they're coming from. No one notices nor cares at $megacorp, and my work is internal and humble.
I do it for self-improvement and to make the time I spend working for them worthwhile to me.
I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!
Isn't this a safety hazard?
People get framed and stolen from all the time and this will certainly make it worse.
This is how Netstar and Tracker does it in South Africa. To massive success. So much so that a car without one of these installed is basically uninsurable.
There is no need for external 3rd party tracking.
Please check back later
Error 1027
This website has been temporarily rate limitedI.e., if someone does a statewide lookup in Nebraska, all Nebraska-based Flock customers receive the search metadata. Ostensibly, to be able to track if "their" ALPR data has been queried. Those audit logs are public record.
This is also how IL discovered out-of-state agencies were using data from Illinois for immigration enforcement (after FOIA by a citizen, of course; apparently none of the IL law enforcement agencies audited their data for unlawful activity).