Have I been Flocked? – Check if your license plate is being watched (opens in new tab)

tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are".

Isn't that the state with license plates that say "live free or die?" Unless, of course, you have a moral objection to that statement, cf. Wooley v. Maynard.

Yeah, and as an ex-employee, that's something they heavily "rely" on, and push as an end run around laws.

Like in my state, LE can't collect this stuff directly. Then they started saying "Well, we can do this..." and started contracting for private companies to do the collection on their behalf. When _that_ was legislated away, they've now pivoted to "Well, if the company is doing it of their own accord, we can still purchase the data since it wasn't, technically, created for us."

Would they be subject to CCPA, then?

What's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras.

Yeah, and Illinois law defines that as "ALPR data" and restricts its disclosure.

I have no doubt that local agencies are screwing up the law, which is very new, but in Illinois "ALPR information" means information gathered by an ALPR or created from the analysis of data generated by an ALPR (everything after the quotation marks is a straight excerpt of the statute), and is confidential.

Do not get me started on small public bodies screwing up FOIA.

The camera could be separate from the billboard, and point at the backs of the cars. The billboard would be a short distance past that.

Flock cameras are oriented to read rear plates. One would need a camera similarly configured + a billboard some distance in front, or perhaps 2 billboards, a 1-2 setup + payoff combo, the camera behind the first billboard, and the dynamic text on the second. Pulling up other public data correlated to the plate - where legal - may make a splash. I'm thinking addressing the car owner by their first name.

I would also recommend Benn Jordan's YT channel, he has a couple of videos covering flock cameras. His latest one is: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uB0gr7Fh6lY

edit: grammar

That website is a bit misleading, their "worldwide" map includes ALL ALPR cameras, not just the ones operated by Flock or for-profit surveillance companies.

The ones on their map near my location are all for automatic license plate recognition to enter parking garages. Not exactly the dystopian nightmare their homepage warned me about.

This is dystopian as fuck

I think it's mostly just a privacy issue. The idea that your every movement is being recorded by the government is Orwellian, especially when they try to hide its existence, lie about its capabilities, and you have no say in the matter (referencing NSA metadata monitoring). The average person thinks their ring camera is like their coffee maker, an individual piece of technology they own and control. If it were released that everyone's ring cameras were being fed into some NSA program running facial recognition to track citizens movement I'm sure they would be upset about that too.

It’s trivial for law enforcement to track your movement with ALPR cameras. Information feeds into a single database, paid for by law enforcement agencies, and they just connect the dots.

Ring camera footage requires law enforcement to get a warrant or for individuals to give consent to supply the footage.

Now tell me which system makes it easier for a cop to stalk their ex.

> have had for decades have recently become big news in America, I believe because they're now being used for immigration purposes?

That is one aspect.

But they are also now "using AI to analyze vehicle movements for suspicious patterns and proactively alerting police to investigate". What could possibly go wrong with that?

Or that there are microphones in certain Flock devices, and they've discussed their intent to activate those and do that with speech analysis.

Garrett Langley, the CEO, has a disturbingly Minority Report-esque vision for a world with, in his words, "no crime", "thanks to Flock".

And these are all steps towards it. Interesting you mention Ring, because Flock has partnered with Amazon and is opting all Ring footage into Flock's network and analyses.

They are being set up "for immigration purposes" but that's just a guise for a nation wide integrated system for cops and intel agencies to track every single American in every car down. They want keep an active, real time record of wherever we go and what patterns they exhibit for the algos to predict crime from anything they consider suspicious, possibly for future malicious purposes in a police state.

They’ve gotten cheaper and aggregated into nationwide networks. The older devices were expensive and in police car scenarios required pretty significant effort to install. The mobile flock just gets bolted to the dash.

In my city, most vehicular movement between neighborhoods and in/out of the city is logged. Your safety and civil liberties are dependent on agencies following and auditing their work rules, as the law didn’t anticipate this gives them a lot of discretion.

Unless I'm missing something, Ring cameras film people at my doorstep and are for my personal use, so dont know how they're similar at all even if you don't trust Amazon

Americans (the general public) are a lot more weary of government surveillance than other developed nations. Its one thing that you can get a lot of liberals and conservative to agree on.

Unlike ring cameras which people voluntarily install and the government needs a warrant to access, flock cameras are pretty much exclusively for the government to actively monitor citizens without any court oversight.

No, Workers free tier is 100,000 requests/day. Considering the error is on the main page, each visit is probably taking a minimum of 10+ requests, so it can easily be overwhelmed.

Have I been cloudflare'd?

> With no other identifying info, though, what can they do with a license plate number in isolation?

For typical users not taking extra precautions, visiting a page in a browser is providing additional identifying info, a fact that monetization of the free-as-in-beer web relies heavily upon, but which can be leveraged in other ways, e.g., by a site that draws you in with privacy fears as a technique to get you to submit additional information that can be correlated with it.

Some states, like Michigan, you can request owner information (including address) by a in-person SOS visit and $15 a plate. I've always thought this should be PII and shouldn't be allowed on reddit, for example, where PII is banned. Post a driver with plate in Michigan and you may have doxxed them.

You just work backwards.

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.

Most people park at their home and many drive to work. If you have both of those data points, you can identify people.

In many states, car registration data is public information. If you have a license plate number, you can easily look up who the car is registered to, where they live, etc. License plate numbers are PII.

Suppose the guy behind this website keeps a log of the requests, even accidentally, and eventually gets bought out by Flock themselves (websites critical of companies selling out is unfortunately common). Now Flock has a list of plates of people alert to flock and this gets added to your Palintir threat matrix, so the next time a cop pulls you over for some minor infraction his computer can prime him to be jumpy and trigger happy by labelling you as a potential dissident.

Exactly - you can collect license plates numbers way easier than this. The best data they can really get is a connection to an IP address.

Sell it to the cops and/or ICE as belonging to "self-identified persons of interest."

Flag you as being worth watching, or up your composite score by a point or whatever.

Checksum?

100% always feels like a trap.

Some are installed on private property, and supply data to the property owner. Some are installed on public property, and supply data to the government.

Why would they break into individual hardware when they have unfettered access to the whole system in certain countries’ cases and can likely just hack into it in more adversarial cases? It is one of the several reasons why … yes, I know YC backed and funded Flock … the company and everyone in government that contracts for them to provide this mass surveillance service, is objectively and inherently treasonous. But don’t shoot the messenger just because people don’t like the message.

“Whoopsie, my negligence I shouldn’t have been engaging in in the first place” is no exemption from being a traitor, betrayal.

What that means for society and if and what it does about it is a different question. Based on historical trends, it all probably won’t matter since we’ve clearly crossed a threshold and the “PPP” tyranny (different from the trillion dollars in PPP loans that were forgiven and contributed to the inflation) is upon us because it wasn’t prevented when it still could have been.

I don’t think people here are even tracking what is going on in TX, UT, LA (and soon to be nation wide); where as of Jan 1st all new accounts will have to provide government ID to install any app on a mobile device.

Why should I care if some low-ranking party official in China knows where I drive, when my actual government will use that data to deport me if I sufficiently piss it off?

Yup.

Nowadays, we say “hugged to death.”

That is oft-repeated, but case law is starting to show it's not strictly true:

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).

clarity is good. i believe that was a reference to the futility of posting "i do not consent" messages on social media.

But don’t I have a right to not get stalked?

You make a great point! Setting a good example by being ambitious creates the Pygmalion Effect. The unavoidable contagion of repeated improvement making people hungry for more.

I also find everyone is hungry for kudos. I recommend being very liberal and publicly vocal with genuine kudos if you have them!

fixed

You can say the same about a line of code.

But the point is that security _can_ be addressed, while still allowing the vehicle to be identified.

Well, let me ask you this. What is your expectation from society if you or your family is personally affected?

But think of the children!!?

Okay? so what. People can see that I drive? do you not think that verizon/ att /google cant see where you traveling by the phone you carry?

Oh no lots people can now see that I go to costco and publix.

It's not one or the other. Everyone should be opposed to both.

Psst, hey, we hate all of those, too. Hating one shitty surveillance-state service doesn't preclude hating other shitty surveillance-state services.