Tag: mass surveillance

Doctor Doom Thanked Seattle for All the Surveillance Cameras

Doctor Doom took the podium at a Public Safety Committee meeting on Tuesday to thank the council for covering the city in surveillance cameras. “Doom took over Axon enterprises […] and now Doom will be watching you. Your continued cooperation expanding Doom’s surveillance network is required,” the Marvel supervillain said.

“This is the first of Doom’s gifts to the city of Seattle. The second gift is this: Doom will expand the real-time crime center to all neighborhoods with over 1,000 cameras watching every move,” Doom said. “Doom has total dominion over the city of Seattle. Doom will be behind the cameras watching those seeking reproductive or gender-affirming care. Doom will be able to find your immigrant neighbors and Doom will be able to ensure the safety of the women of Seattle alongside officers that stalk their exes.”

Doom is actually Clifford Cawthon, a policy advisor for the Washington State Department of Commerce. Cawthorn donned the silver mask and gloves to draw attention to tech-driven mass surveillance in Seattle, an issue he’s been passionate about for years. Cawthon is also a member of Community Not Cameras, a local activist group that’s attempting to reign in Seattle’s use of surveillance systems sold by Flock and Axon.

Seattle’s PD has access to 62 surveillance cameras around the city, many of them hooked up to a real-time crime center (RTCC). “The RTCC takes in information from a vast pool of sources, including CCTV, [body-worn camera], geolocation data, automatic license plate recognition (ALPR), alert sources like shot detection or alarm systems, and computer-aided dispatch (CAD) software,” according to a description on the surveillance company Axon’s website.

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Texas Police Used AI to Write Report About Using Flock to Search for Woman Who Had Abortion

The Texas sheriff’s office that used Flock to search more than 80,000 cameras nationwide for a woman who had a self-administered abortion used Axon’s Draft One AI tool to help write a police report about the incident, documents shared with 404 Media show. The tool was used in part to summarize a discussion of “the legal implications of the situation.”

404 Media first reported on the incident in May 2025 in which the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched Flock’s nationwide network for the whereabouts of a woman who self-administered an abortion, highlighting the threat of this AI-powered surveillance system being used to criminalize or track women seeking reproductive healthcare. The use of both Flock and Axon’s Draft One, which uses audio from body camera footage to automatically draft police reports using artificial intelligence, shows how quickly police departments have come to use AI surveillance tools even in critically sensitive cases.

“I acknowledge this report was generated using Draft One by Axon,” a section of the report reads.

The abortion case has since become a flashpoint in the controversy over the use of Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, has repeatedly and erroneously suggested that 404 Media misreported the case and that the search was done only for the woman’s safety because her family was worried about her. 404 Media previously reported that the entire police investigation was done at the behest of the woman’s abusive partner and that police discussed whether they were allowed to charge her with a crime: “It was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion,” a police report previously obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared with 404 Media said. Concern from her family is never mentioned in that earlier police report or in the AI-generated police report used to write this article.

The AI-generated incident report was obtained by journalist Cameron Probert of the Tri-City Herald and shared with 404 Media. The report shows there is extensive body camera and audio evidence that would clarify what happened in the case, and that at least one police officer, sergeant Damien Bethel, used Draft One to write his report on the incident. Parts of a police incident report show that Draft One was used to summarize a discussion between police over “the legal implications of the situation” and other investigative aspects of the case. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has repeatedly refused to release body camera footage from the case, including in response to 404 Media’s public records requests.

“Deputies discussed the legal implications of the situation, noting that while the girlfriend self-administered the abortion pill, there were no criminal charges applicable under current Texas law,” Bethel’s report states, providing no more details about the specifics of the discussion. “Deputies also considered the possibility of a civil lawsuit against the pharmaceutical company that supplied the pill.”

Bethell’s Draft One report further states, “There is digital multi-media evidence from Body Worn Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library. There is digital multi-media evidence of In-Car Camera footage of this call for service in the AXON Evidence Library or the WatchGuard Evidence Library. There were digital images captured while on the scene.” The Johnson County Sheriff’s Department has thus far refused to release even redacted versions of this evidence that the EFF and 404 Media have separately requested.

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Missouri Rep. Burlison TEARS INTO The Surveillance State – Should Flock Cameras Be Abolished? Is China Spying On Us Through Our Cell Phones?

Rep. Eric Burlison, R-MO, blasted the Surveillance State that exists within our federal government, an ongoing debate that has existed for decades.

Following the devastating 9/11 attacks just 25 years ago, the U.S. government has ramped up efforts to spy on it’s own citizens, with most common argument in favor of this is being  that it keeps the American People safe and prevents something like 9/11 from ever happening again.

In 2026 new debates surrounding the use of flock cameras and their expansion have raised concerns that this violates our 4th amendment rights to privacy, while supporters continue to argue that it ensures public safety.

Flock camera across the country are being sabotaged in response to their expansion.

Burlison and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, introduced a bill known as the “Flock-Off Act,” which would cut off federal funding for flock camera expansion and address the growing concerns in the American public over their usage.

The bill has six additional cosponsors.

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The High Cost Of The Automated Flock-Camera Surveillance State

Flock cameras, and the online surveillance network behind them, offer many ways for law enforcement officials, and other government bureaucrats, to abuse their access to information about the personal lives of the taxpayers. 

For example, a Kentucky police officer has been caught using the surveillance network to stalk women. Another officer in Massachusetts has been accused of using Flock cameras to track her ex-girlfriend. A police officer in Indianapolis was using Flock camera data to track his own wife and friends, checking up on them “3,759 times over a 10-month period – an average of about 12 lookups per day.”

These are just some of the ones who have been caught or accused of abusing Automated License Plate Readers (ALPRs), the most well known of which operate under the “Flock” brand. It’s impossible to say how many other taxpayer-funded offenders are out there using the surveillance state to serve their particular personal grudges, perversions, and agendas. 

In other cases, Kansas police used the surveillance system to pursue a man who wrote a critical op-ed about the department, while a Colorado police officer wrongfully accused a woman of theft based on a Flock hit and then refused to look at evidence proving her innocence. A mother and her children were held at gunpoint because ALPR cameras wrongly flagged their car as stolen. The cases in which police use incorrect Flock data to abuse the innocent are myriad, and researchers are just now starting to document the known cases.  

There are very few controls on how police can use the surveillance databases that underlie the data collection. Records have shown that police can put out a “Flock alert” to track a private vehicle without the vehicle owner or operator being the target of any legitimate investigation. 

Not surprisingly, government agencies appear highly motivated to set up these cameras and use them prolifically. As of this week, there are more than 110,000 confirmed Flock cameras installed in the United States. The company itself states a plan for more than 120,000 cameras. That’s just the flock-branded cameras. At least 135,000 ALPR cameras, overall, have been independently documented in the US. All of these are funded by the taxpayers of course, and are installed with the enthusiastic support of government law enforcement agencies. This has all happened in just a few years. 

Naturally, much of it being funded by federal dollars. These spy camera programs receive funds from a variety of federal grant programs via the FBI, the Department of Justice, the Department of Homeland Security, and FEMA. None of this is surprising. Since 9/11 “local” police has relied heavily on federal dollars for equipment and other types of spending. “Support your local police” rarely has any meaning anymore. Most police agencies are adjuncts of the federal government, and most willingly share their surveillance data with federal agencies. The potential for abuse is immense since the license-plate data is open to countless users who have access to the network nationwide. The Governor of Utah, for instance, recently noted that 10 Flock cameras in a single county of Utah were searched more than 5 million times “between February 2022 and July 2026, with the vast majority of those searches (nearly 97%) coming from police agencies outside of Utah, from 45 states.” 

Many people wrongly think that these are just ordinary surveillance cameras that can be accessed piecemeal by actual humans. In reality, these are AI-assisted automated systems designed to provide easily-accessed tracking data on the movements of any American who drives a car on America’s streets. 

Tax-funded uniformed bureaucrats—i.e., “police officers”—have been “all in” on spying on Americans using taxpayers’ own hard-earned cash. Knowing that many citizens might object, police agencies have attempted to keep it all as secret as possible. This is how tens of thousands of cameras just suddenly seemed to appear in many American communities without a public vote or announcement. In at least some cases, police have used obviously deceptive methods to get their cameras. All at taxpayer expense. In Tennessee, the Mayor of Knox County, Mises Institute supporter Glenn Jacobs, found that police carefully staggered payments to ALPR corporations so that each payment fell under totals that would trigger review from elected officials. The police don’t just lie to the public. They lie to their own bosses in the elected government 

It’s all just a reminder that if government bureaucrats are given new tools for surveilling the public, those bureaucrats will certainly abuse those tools. 

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Flock Is Losing Dozens of Contracts as Controversy Grows

The outrage is surging.

Mass surveillance technology might be popular with police departments, but for the US public, it’s becoming an increasingly difficult sell.

At least 54 cities across the US have voted to cancel, non-renew, or reject Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPRs) since the start of the year, according to data collected by the Washington Examiner. That comes after reporting in February that some 30 cities had done the same since 2025, indicative of the rising backlash against the tech.

In all, the Examiner reports cities in 23 states have shredded their Flock contracts so far this year, led by California and Wisconsin, which each have seven rejections, cancellations, or deactivations. Other heavy hitters include New York, Washington, and Massachusetts with four each, and Virginia with three.

Though Flock has its cameras in over 5,000 US cities as of July 2026, the rise in rejections at the municipal level comes amidst a tidal wave of outrage around issues of privacy and civil rights.

In cities where civic leaders have been slow to respond to these anxieties, citizens have moved quickly to take matters into their own hands by damaging, obscuring, or stealing the surveillance cameras in order to stop them from recording footage. A rise in official cancelations or rejections shows municipal leaders are catching on to the reality that the American populace broadly disproves of the technology, and they aren’t afraid to show it.

Arguably the highest-profile contract cancellation for Flock came when the Los Angeles Police Department decided to non-renew its years-long contract with the company, a decision motivated by a searing internal audit of the company’s technology. The internal report found that, in just two months, Flock’s ALPRs contributed to 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts, resulting in a false-positive rate of 32.3 percent.

With no sign of the outrage settling anytime soon, it’s likely these 54 cities could just be the start.

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Same Cage, New Landlord: How Axon is Replacing Flock Without You Noticing

Communities across the country spent the better part of two years fighting to tear down Flock Safety’s license plate readers, and in city after city, they won. Then, in the same council chambers where residents celebrated those victories, officials quietly signed even bigger checks to a company that builds the exact same surveillance apparatus, only this time it’s hidden inside the streetlight over your driveway.

Since January of this year alone, roughly 23 cities have canceled, rejected, or deactivated their Flock contracts, and close to 98 have done so since 2021, as residents raised alarms over warrantless tracking, indefinite data retention, and a vendor-run national database that agencies across the country could tap into without a warrant. Asheville, North Carolina became the latest flashpoint in late August, when its city council voted 5-2 to terminate the city’s contract and order every piece of Flock hardware removed from its streets, following a marathon public comment session and a public call from the mayor herself to shut the cameras down. Lansing, Michigan followed almost the same week, with residents packing council chambers to demand an end to what one described as adjusting his daily commute just to avoid being logged by the cameras. Cleveland’s safety committee, for its part, voted down a quarter-million-dollar Flock renewal outright after council members openly questioned whether the cameras made anyone safer at all.

By every surface-level measure, this looks like a movement winning. It isn’t. It’s a market-share transfer, and the company picking up the business is Axon, the Scottsdale, Arizona outfit better known for Tasers and police body cameras, which has spent the past year building a product engineered specifically to defeat the kind of organizing that just took Flock down. Axon calls it Lightpost, and unlike Flock’s freestanding poles, it clips directly onto a streetlight that’s already there, drawing power straight from the light’s own socket. No new poles. No trenching. No visible object for a resident to photograph, protest, or bring to a council meeting.

Axon’s own marketing describes it as a way to turn streetlights into real-time detection tools, combining license plate recognition, vehicle attribute recognition, and live streaming video into a form factor built for speed of deployment. A companion product, Axon Outpost, offers the same capability as a standalone unit that can be mounted on new or existing poles, buildings, vehicles, trailers, or even trees, and can run on solar power when no electrical hookup is available. Both feed directly into Axon Fusus, a platform that integrates footage from body cameras, squad cars, drones, and third-party cameras into a single searchable, real-time operational view for police departments.

The company building this doesn’t hide the fact that blending in is the point. Ubicquia, the infrastructure firm Axon partnered with to build Lightpost, markets the devices as mounting directly on existing streetlight infrastructure and blending seamlessly into the urban landscape, while avoiding complex permitting processes altogether. That single sentence is the entire strategy laid bare. Flock’s cameras became targets because they were visible, arguable, votable things sitting on a pole at an intersection. A camera hidden inside the fixture that already lights your street at night isn’t something most residents will ever notice, let alone organize against, and that is by design rather than accident.

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Governor DeSantis Revokes Permits For Flock Cameras On Florida State Highways

Florida Governor Ron DeSantis has ordered the removal of all Flock Safety automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras from state highway right-of-ways, citing privacy, data, and systematic surveillance concerns.

The Daily Caller reports that DeSantis ordered all Flock cameras to be removed from the “state highway system,” including interstates such as I-10 and I-75, within 30 days, in a Florida Department of Transportation (FDOT) memo on Monday.

According to WCTV, the order specifically targets cameras on state-owned roads, including major interstates like I-10 and I-75 but does not automatically ban cameras operating on local city or county roads, nor does it impact devices installed on private or commercial properties.

Local law enforcement agencies will have 30 days to remove the hardware and if they fail to comply, FDOT will remove the cameras independently.

DeSantis remains supportive of law enforcement but acknowledged that growing evidence of camera misuse has raised legitimate concerns about government surveillance.

During a press conference last Wednesday, DeSantis warned against allowing Florida to become a “surveillance state” and said, “I think people are right to be concerned.”

The Republican Governor stated:

But, you also have to say, okay, how could this be misused? And how could a private company misuse the data, but also law enforcement? We know there was an officer in Florida who was using the LPR data to track like an ex-girlfriend or something like that.

DeSantis called on the Florida Legislature to cement permanent regulations into law during the next legislative session and advocated for a comprehensive AI Bill of Rights to institute strict criminal penalties for data misuse and protect citizens from emerging digital monitoring methods.

Following the announcement, several sheriff’s departments, including those in Putnam, Liberty and Franklin counties, announced they would end their own license plate reader programs.

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Flock Has a Powerful New AI Tool for Police. We Got Its Code

Vehicle surveillance giant Flock Safety has told the public for years that its technology “cannot recognize, identify, or track individuals.” It has now built a system that does both, an artificial intelligence tool for police that can identify drivers and track vehicles by their patterns of movement alone, WIRED has learned.

Drawing on a network of cameras that logs the movements of drivers in more than 6,000 communities, the tool can pick out potential witnesses by how often their cars pass through a neighborhood, or surface a driver’s “associates” from the cameras they pass together. Because the system also reaches police case files, 911 dispatch logs, and commercial identity records, those plates can be turned into names, home addresses, and relatives. It can search for people in an area drawn on a map based on nothing more than a physical description.

The software, originally called Nightshift and more recently renamed OS Investigate, ships with 69 prewritten prompts that officers can select, review, or edit, and then submit to the AI. Officers can also input prompts of their own.

The suggested prompts sit in a cache of more than 450 files that WIRED found on Flock’s own website, served by its login pages to anyone who loaded them. The code describes 45 tools at the AI’s disposal, giving it access to plate scans and camera metadata, arrest records, case files, dispatch logs, ballistics results, and commercial databases that contain Social Security numbers, dates of birth, phone numbers, email addresses, relatives and associates.

Flock says it is testing the product with a small group of law enforcement partners and describes it as still in development, with capabilities that may not reflect what it eventually sells. It arrives as the company faces bipartisan political pressure, a growing record of officers caught misusing its platform, and a wave of vandalism that has left cameras sawed off and lenses painted over in cities across the country.

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DeSantis Orders State Agencies To Pull Down Flock Surveillance Cameras From Florida Rights-Of-Way

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis on Wednesday announced that state agencies are removing Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader cameras from state rights-of-way, stepping up his campaign to curb what he called an out-of-control surveillance system spreading throughout the Sunshine State.

“Pull ’em down,” DeSantis told reporters at the press conference following his announcement, noting that all of the Flock Safety cameras on state rights-of-way will be removed by state agencies. The governor said that the cameras, which are used by various state agencies, are being removed following his remarks at Florida International University in Miami earlier in the week regarding the Flock Safety cameras and their use as a mass criminal surveillance system with little to no oversight.

Locally, surveillance on roads across South Florida has been the focus of Flock Safety’s automated license plate readers installed by participating state, county and municipal law enforcement agencies. In this region, state troopers used the system to support the federal immigration sweeps of Operation Tidal Wave. Statewide, Reason magazine reported that more than a third of those arrested had no prior criminal history. 404 Media first reported last spring that Florida wildlife officers were accessing the system using the accounts of other law enforcement agencies, including to run immigration related queries, totaling 38 such looks in a single month, without Flock Safety contracts of their own.

Most Flock Safety cameras are owned by thousands of local police and sheriff’s departments, but DeSantis is asking for an accounting of all the cameras that state agencies have and how they are using them. The governor said he is also looking at New Hampshire’s approach to limiting the placement of such cameras on state property as a model for Florida legislation.

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Texas Governor Orders Halt to State Funding of Flock Cameras

Texas Governor Greg Abbott ordered all state agencies to stop funding local law enforcement Flock camera purchases and operations. The move comes shortly after the Texas Tribune announced an investigation into $30 million provided to local police departments for Flock cameras.

The order from the Texas governor came Thursday, shortly after an investigation published by the Texas Tribune came online. The investigation revealed that the State of Texas added a $1 fee to car insurance policies. That money was then distributed to local law enforcement agencies to help reduce catalytic converter thefts.

Texas funding led to the purchase of about 2,000 Flock Cameras by the Motor Vehicle Crime Prevention Board, the Tribune reported. The State funded an additional $15.9 million to Texas DPS to purchase an additional 1,200 cameras.

Abbott’s Communications Director, Andrew Mahaleris, told the Tribune, “To the extent that cities get any funding for those cameras, most of it comes from the federal government. To the extent any funding comes from Texas agencies, those agencies are clarifying that those funds cannot be used for Flock cameras.”

Despite their success in solving many crimes, including the kidnapping of children, the surveillance camera systems have come under massive scrutiny after concerns of abuse of civil liberties arose.

The Tribune reported that the number of Flock cameras purchased by the insurance policy fee may be on the low side, as they had difficulty obtaining complete information from agencies.

Many Texas legislators expressed concern about the excessive use of electronic surveillance through the AI-driven Flock system.

One legislator, State Representative Mitch Little (R-Lewisville), told the Tribune, “The sheer volume of information captured is not something that is entertained, in my view, by the Fourth Amendment.”

In an interview on Bloomberg’s Balance of Power, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) expressed strong disapproval of the threat of over-surveillance posed by these systems.  Cruz stated:

I’ll tell you what a Ted Cruz would make of it, which is I don’t like Flock cameras. I don’t like government surveillance, I don’t think the government should be surveilling innocent citizens. We should use law enforcement to go after criminals. But we have a presumption of innocence. And I think the surveillance state — China has built an espionage and surveillance state. I don’t want to see America the same way. I think these Flock cameras really invite abuse, and I’m hopeful the political process will constrain it.

State and local law enforcement praise the technology and its impact in solving or reducing crime. The Dallas Police Department’s Major Felony and Vehicle Recovery Division said the department uses hundreds of cameras to track suspects involved in violent offenses, hit-and-runs, and auto thefts. The clearance time for many of these crimes fell from days to hours, the department stated.

Texas DPS also reports the use of automatic pings to intercept stolen vehicles, fleeing felons, and human smuggling operations along major highway corridors.

Governor Greg Abbott’s abrupt freeze on state funding for Flock cameras highlights a growing collision between law enforcement technology and constitutional privacy rights in Texas. While police agencies credit the AI surveillance network with drastically cutting crime clearance times and recovering stolen property, the revelation of millions in state-funded grants—drawn from auto insurance fees—has catalyzed broad bipartisan pushback.

With state lawmakers questioning the program’s Fourth Amendment boundaries and Abbott shutting off the state spigot, local departments will likely face increased scrutiny and tighter legislative guardrails if they choose to continue funding these automated tracking networks using local or federal dollars.

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