“‘No. Flock does not work with [ICE].’ But in practice, the public records show…thousands of agencies around the country were sharing their camera data with the Florida Fish and Wildlife Conservation, which was then regularly performing lookups for ICE.”
www.404media.co/floridas-wil...
Exact same thing happened to me
Another story on abuse of mass #surveillance data! 😩
"in 'one month‘s time,' the sheriff queried his wife’s license plate number approximately 152 times. His stated purpose was to assess the system’s reliability before a contract decision."
Ban ALPRs! 🚫
#deflock #alpr
When I was observing detectives in Baltimore, it was clear that suspects know cops are obsessed with proxy objects. They would take advantage of it. They might steal a car, then steal plates from another car to replace the original plates, then go shoot someone. Left detectives in tangles for days.
This is something that has always bothered me about object-based surveillance. A car (or phone or license plate or whatever) is a proxy for a person, but assumptions are always made that object = person. Seems ripe for mistakes and false positives.
oaklandside.org/2026/03/23/a...
Book launch day! “Your Data Will Be Used Against You: Policing in the Age of Self Surveillance” is out.
Bluesky friends, I would be so grateful if you would buy a copy. And if you can’t afford it, could you at least share this announcement. Thank you. #BookSky
politics-prose.com/search?q=You...
If police found ALPRs to be more powerful than the spy plane, and the spy plane has been deemed unconstitutional, it would seem to me that ALPRs are probably unconstitutional too.
That’s not how police see it. I sat behind the scenes and watched how Baltimore police used both the spy plane and ALPRs. I wrote a whole book about it. Police consistently treated ALPRs as MORE powerful and reliable than aerial surveillance.
Schmidt relies heavily on the idea that Flock ALPRs are nowhere near as powerful as Baltimore’s aerial surveillance program (the “spy plane”). The claim is that the spy plane was like a GPS attached to every single citizen and Flock is just photos of license plates.
The problem with Schmidt is that it makes a decision about the power of technologies without reference to empirical evidence of their actual deployment. The decision fundamentally misunderstands the empirical reality of the power of ALPRs, as they are perceived and used by police.
🎯 “The real question in Schmidt is not whether police can observe a car on a public street. It is whether the government can build a persistent, searchable database of everyone’s movements without judicial oversight.”
secure-justice.org/blog/alprs-a...
Mass surveillance can be a threat to privacy, sure, but it can also be a threat to safety. Misreads are a common harm unleashed by surveillance tech. The "privacy vs safety" debate framing rarely discusses this danger to public safety caused BY surveillance.
www.businessinsider.com/flock-safety...
The 100th episode of Peoples and Things?!? It was a blast talking to Lee Vinsel about my book Spy Plane on this very special episode of the 'ol P-n-T. athenaeum.vt.domains/peoplesandth...
@ucpress.bsky.social
This episode was so great! I have so many students doing mini research projects and theses on social mobility at elite colleges. Looking forward to reading this book!@danielrmorrison.bsky.social @mosbornesoc.bsky.social
Worth a read. One thing I'd add is that the "imperial boomerang" often starts in the US, then goes abroad, then comes back. And that's what you see with companies like Palantir or Shotspotter. local US cops->IDF->federal US cops
theintercept.com/2025/04/30/i...
This is horrifying. How much do you want to bet some clueless Palantir consultant was behind the intel for this raid. #dumbdystopia
kfor.com/news/local/w...
Enshitification…engaged
All of this just feels like the logical outcome of massive wealth inequality in which the rich go from merely segregated to literally living in a different version of reality.
www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-i...
Had a student (astrophysics major) tell me all the jobs in her dream field (federal patent law) are gone bc of govt cuts. Then said only thing she is getting offers for are places like Anduril, General Atomics, etc. 🙃
Love to!
Got a whole book on it for ya. So many examples.
It’s almost like the whole thing was a scam.
Glad to see Williams showing up for this.
www.presidentsalliance.org/wp-content/u...
True of literally every hyped thing right now
ICE may have deleted it, but you should NEVER forget that they posted it.
This administration is mounting a full-scale assault on freedom of thought and expression (not to mention the rule of law), the likes and brazenness of which we have not seen before.
