Tag: mass surveillance

The Trump Administration Is Building A Pre Crime Panopticon Unlike Any Authoritarian Regime Before It

As of late American citizens have been more concerned with surveillance and privacy than ever before. Rightfully so, as we see an explosion of surveillance equipment being installed across the country.

For decades, liberty activists have diligently watched and warned of the slowly encroaching mission creep of domestic mass surveillance seeping its way into everyday American life. Opposition to such violations of fundamental liberty have been one of the few causes to transcend the false left / right paradigm, with instances such as leftists opposed to the surveillance of civil rights groups during the days of COINTELPRO and conservative opposition to the surveillance of Second Amendment activists.

Even today, amid rising concerns of the mass implementation of Flock cameras across the nation, these concerns are actively creating a bridge of solidarity among the polarized political chasm.

While surveillance of the American citizenry has existed in some way for more than a century, the persistent punitive pervasiveness of such violations of privacy have been perpetually on the rise since the passage of the Patriot Act following the false flag attack of September 11th, 2001.

Interestingly enough, the provisions of the Patriot Act with all of its violations of constitutional protections had already been cooked up well before the September 11th attacks but was projected not to pass a congressional vote until such attacks took place. Indeed, the Patriot Act simply served as an expansion of surveillance authority circumventing the Constitution implemented in the 1996 Antiterrorism Act, itself only justified following the Oklahoma City false flag attack just a year prior. Simply a coincidence, surely. 

The conversation surrounding concerns about domestic mass surveillance reached mainstream dialog following the explosive revelations of NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden in 2013, when leaked documents provided to journalist Glenn Greenwald revealed a sprawling network of illegal spying against American citizens through the National Security Agency’s PRISM program.

Despite Snowden’s revelations and warnings, and subsequent surveillance scandals in the years since, next to nothing has been done to curtail this campaign of illegal mass spying against the American people. In fact, it has only continued to worsen.

This brings us to today. Oftentimes in discussion of illegal mass surveillance, the cynical statist would posit a straw man argument to the likes of “What does it matter? If you’ve done nothing wrong you should have nothing to hide.” As if an all encompassing surveillance state simply exists in a vacuum. As if history has not demonstrated again and again the kind of atrocities enabled by repressive regimes who track, trace, and database their citizenry.

Mass surveillance does not simply exist to “keep an eye on people”, it serves as a tool of the state to suppress dissent, identify and silence dissidents, and centralize control over the populace.

Here at The Free Thought Project, we have warned for years about the dangers of integrating artificial intelligence with law enforcement. 

Now, it appears the Trump administration is diving head first into a Minority Report style pre crime surveillance system powered by AI to throw a digital dragnet over the entirety of the American people.

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A Flock Camera Flagged Her Car in a Homicide by Mistake. Police Pulled Her Over at Gunpoint Twice

A Wisconsin woman was stopped by police with guns drawn twice in one week after an automated license plate camera wrongly linked her car to a Milwaukee homicide. Milwaukee police say the alert should have been deleted days earlier, but a staffer never cleared it.

According to Local 12, Amber Newell was driving on I-94 in Brookfield, west of Milwaukee, on the afternoon of August 6 when a Flock camera flagged her vehicle as connected to a homicide investigation. FOX6 Milwaukee reported that video from the interstate showed multiple officers with guns drawn and a passenger sticking their hands out the window. After Brookfield officers reached out to the Milwaukee Police Department to verify the alert, MPD responded that the vehicle and its occupants were no longer of interest, and the people were let go. Newell told FOX6 the same thing had happened to her earlier that week.

The issue was not the camera reading her plate wrong. Milwaukee police said this was a personnel problem, not a Flock problem: staff failed to remove a wanted vehicle alert from the system after it was no longer needed. Brookfield Police Chief Christopher Garcia has defended the stop, and Milwaukee police back him up, saying his officers acted on the information they had. Newell described the fear in plain terms. “I haven’t been asleep since this has happened,” she said. “Every time I close my eyes, all I can see is guns.” She also said her young daughter is now afraid to ride in the car.

Flock Safety operates a network of roughly 120,000 cameras across the country, and the system works by photographing plates, timestamping them, logging a location, and checking each read against police hotlists. When a plate matches, officers get an alert. That means your car’s movements can land in a searchable database whether or not you are suspected of anything, and the accuracy of any given stop depends entirely on whether the underlying list is correct and current.

The louder story this year has been deliberate abuse. Milwaukee alone has seen two officers charged: Josue Ayala, who prosecutors say searched a partner’s plate and that partner’s ex nearly 200 times, and internal affairs detective Tehrangi Chapman, who was later charged after allegedly misusing the same system he was assigned to investigate. The Institute for Justice has documented at least a couple dozen cases nationwide of officers using plate readers to track romantic interests, and a Washington Post review found at least 50 officers accused of misusing these systems. Cities are reacting. Chandler, Arizona pulled 40 Flock cameras this month after an audit turned up an anomaly it could not explain through normal police work.

What happened to Newell is different from stalking, but it comes from the same weak point: an audit trail and an accuracy check only work if a person is actually watching them. A separate running tally of reported Flock errors found drivers who were repeatedly stopped after their own plates were mistakenly added to hotlists, and one man who spent 13 days in jail after a camera capture misidentified his car. Flock has said its cameras are about 99% accurate, but at tens of billions of reads a month, even a tiny error rate becomes a steady stream of real people staring down real guns. 

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Flock Cameras Come to Norman, Despite Council Rejection

Norman, Oklahoma’s city council turned down Flock’s automated license plate readers more than once. The surveillance cameras hit the city anyway, carried in by the county sheriff and a scatter of homeowners associations the council has no authority over.

All nine members of the council said no. Mayor Stephen Tyler Holman told 404 Media that Flock gave the city two presentations in three years, both at the request of a police department that wanted the cameras, and that the company’s answers on privacy and data security were what sank the deal. He asked why anyone would want a record of every vehicle going in and out of the city, whether or not the driver had done anything wrong, held for 30 days on a database whose security and access nobody at Flock could fully account for.

“Those were some of the reasons why we ended up not doing it,” Holman said. Some council members wanted any retention measured in minutes, not a month.

That refusal governs the city government and nothing past it. Norman lies inside Cleveland County, and the county’s commissioners approved a $60,000 renewal for 20 Flock cameras run by the Cleveland County Sheriff’s Office, an agreement that runs through December 2026 and passed on a 2-1 vote after the board postponed the decision three times waiting on a legal opinion from the district attorney.

Jacob McHughes, the commissioner whose vote carried the renewal, backed it only on the strength of that opinion. He said the cameras belong with the state legislature rather than county officials, and he called the legal question unsettled, “I think it needs legislative approval, and I think it’s super gray.”

Rod Cleveland, a commissioner who happens to share the county’s name, cast the only vote against the renewal. He said the Flock model builds “a vast, warrantless surveillance network that tracks the movements of every driver, innocent or otherwise,” feeding private databases reachable nationwide and, potentially, by federal agencies, and he would not support it without enforceable limits on how long the data is kept and who can reach it.

“There are numerous homeowners associations that use them too,” Holman said, and the city itself, by his account, is now the only body in the area holding out. By the police department’s own count, fewer than a dozen privately owned Flock cameras already operate inside Norman, held by local businesses and neighborhoods the council cannot touch.

More than 80 cities have canceled Flock contracts, and Holman said the company turned Norman’s own stance into a selling line at that last presentation, warning the room that people “would find that out and they’d come to commit crime in Norman because they know that we don’t have Flock cameras.” Norman borders an Oklahoma City metro already blanketed by the cameras, so the pitch amounted to telling a town that its restraint was a liability.

Holman spent 12 years on the council before beating the incumbent for the mayor’s office last year. He traces the anti-Flock feeling to an earlier fight over the police buying a Bearcat armored vehicle, the sort of purchase most cities rubber-stamp, which Norman took ten years and a bare five-four vote to approve. “There’s a lot of folks here who are weary about government surveillance, especially giving that over to a private company,” he said.

404 Media has reported more about the company the council rejected and the county renewed anyway. Officers keep getting caught using the cameras to stalk people, the system makes mistakes, and a former employee recently said Flock lied to him about how it does business.

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New Database Documents Over 100 Cases of Cops Abusing Flock Surveillance Cameras

A new database launched Wednesday that details more than 100 cases of alleged abuse by law enforcement officers using Flock Safety’s nationwide camera network is adding fresh urgency to the growing backlash against automated license plate readers.

The database, published by the Institute for Justice (IJ)—a libertarian nonprofit public interest law firm based in Arlington, Virginia—documents “romantic stalking, wrongful stops and detentions, non-law enforcement use, and other types of misconduct.”

“Automated license plate readers (ALPRs) were sold to American communities as a targeted tool for catching car thieves and finding missing people,” IJ said in an introduction to the database. “What they actually purchased has grown into something far broader and more frightening: an AI-powered network of cameras that photograph and log the movement of every driver who passes, whether or not they are suspected of any crime.”

“Companies like Flock Safety have now blanketed thousands of communities with ALPRs, quietly assembling powerful mass surveillance systems that can reconstruct where people have been, when, and how often, all without a warrant,” the institute continued. “This dragnet surveillance threatens the freedoms the Fourth Amendment was adopted to protect. These concerns aren’t just abstractions: Every day, innocent people are harmed by officials’ abuse and misuse of these ALPRs.”

“When the government can track the everyday movements of ordinary people—to their jobs, their churches, their doctors, their protests—it holds a kind of power over private life that the Constitution does not allow,” IJ added.

Among the cases highlighted in the database are those of a Florida sheriff’s deputy who allegedly used an ALPR to track and pull over a woman after seeing her at a television shoot, a Texas deputy who reportedly searched tens of thousands of Flock cameras while trying to locate a woman who had allegedly obtained a medication abortion, and a Georgia police chief who reportedly tracked his former girlfriend and her teenage daughter hundreds of times.

The database’s authors warn that even those 100-plus cases may represent only a fraction of the actual misconduct. Officers often provide vague explanations when searching ALPR databases, making systematic detection of abuse difficult. In one case in Norfolk, Virginia, for example, IJ found that three generic search terms accounted for nearly one-third of roughly 230,000 searches over two years. One officer repeatedly entered “la la la la” as a justification without apparently attracting scrutiny.

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Police Launch Live Facial Recognition Trial at London Subway Stations

It was a busy week for the cameras. Nobody, we were assured, would have their face read without the option of going somewhere else instead.

That was the promise at Victoria Underground on Tuesday, where British Transport Police switched on live facial recognition and, with the manners of a good host, laid on “alternative routes” and clear signage so that everyone could make “informed choices about passing through.”

The choice on offer being to let a police computer check your face against a watchlist, or to find some other way into the station, on a Tuesday, at the start of a trial booked to run four months.

The scale is where courtesy starts to sing. TfL’s own draft annual report logs over 1.2 billion passenger journeys in the year, around 3.3 million a day, and since most of those are the same tired people going to work and trudging home again, the honest figure for faces passing a lens on any given day is merely hundreds of thousands, possibly the far side of a million. Each of them, presumably, informed.

The weekend before, Greater Manchester Police had taken the same idea to the Manchester Caribbean Carnival, a party going strong since 1971, where the Manchester Evening News reckoned 60,000 people would turn out across two days of parade, soca and steelpan. The force said the cameras produced 34 alerts and 11 arrests, and that a missing child was found, which is the part no one with a heart wants to be sour about.

Then, emboldened, GMP put out a press release on Tuesday to tell us all how splendidly it is going. 641,000 faces were scanned across 56 deployments. 208 alerts. That’s to say that 99.97 percent of everyone the force has ever photographed at one of these things set off precisely nothing, roughly one ping for every 3,082 law-abiding citizens run through the machine.

Was anyone asked? No, but signage was provided.

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Government Spy Hubs Are Surveilling Anti-Flock Camera Activists

Government spy hubs across America are surveilling activists seeking to remove Flock surveillance cameras from their cities and towns according to documents obtained by Deeper States. These intelligence products show dozens of state fusion centers and their counterparts in the FBI and DHS circulating memos warning that peaceful protesters organizing to stop AI powered surveillance cameras in their backyard are a national security threat.

Alongside the grassroots movement to stop data centers in communities across the country, Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader systems have stirred similar outpourings of civic outrage. At town halls and city council meetings, citizens from all walks of life have demanded local legislators ban flock cameras from being used in their localities. These efforts have found success with over 100 cities canceling their Flock contracts.

Anti-surveillance sentiment has coalesced with the activist organization DeFlock, which maps the tens of thousands of flock cameras pockmarking the country and offers resources to activists who oppose the widespread adaptation of automated license plate readers.

According to Deflock’s mission statement, “ALPRs [automated license plate readers] are a serious risk to your privacy and civil liberties. These systems continuously record your movements without a warrant, probable cause, or even reasonable suspicion. Your driving history is rarely confined to the town or city where the cameras are installed. It’s typically shared with thousands of other agencies nationwide (secretly). Once the data is out of your community, you have no control over how it’s used or what rules apply”.

The organization also points to intentional misuse of Flock systems for stalking and the potential for misidentification of suspects leading to false arrests as further cause for concern. Last year, flock CEO Garett Langley described Deflock activists as a “terroristic organization”, a description he was forced to walk back this week after widespread outrage at the resurfaced comments.

“My comments were a mistake and I apologize,” Langley told Forbes. “There are groups today that have real valid criticisms of the business, and I think what’s changed for us is, as we’ve listened to them and heard them out, what we’re trying to do is find this balance. We believe in a world where we can have safety and privacy.”

Despite Langley’s retreat, intelligence agencies are approaching Deflock’s constitutionally protected speech and organizing with the same tools and language they apply to terrorism. One report obtained by Deeper States and generated by the Wisconsin State Wide Intelligence Center shows intelligence components surveilling organizers of Deflock “days of action” in Alaska and Wisconsin.

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Flock Safety Announces New Privacy Measures After Backlash, Reports of Law Enforcement Abuse

Flock Safety, the private AI-powered security camera company installing surveillance technology around the U.S., announced new security measures amid intensifying backlash and reports of law enforcement abuse. 

In response to public backlash to the ever-growing network of automated license plate readers (ALPRs), the company is working on reforms that “includes enhanced privacy protections, strengthening of control for local law enforcement offices, and enhanced accountability measures,” Fox Business reported Thursday. 

“To start, Flock is reducing its standard data retention window from 30 days to seven. Previously, all data captured by one of the company’s more than 119,000 cameras nationwide was deleted after the 30-day window,” according to the report. “Now, the company announced on Thursday that data will only live on Flock servers for one week.”

However, Flock is creating a feature called “Evidence Mode,” which will allow law enforcement agencies to preserve data for longer based on state and local policies if they need more time to investigate, according to the report. Law enforcement agencies often counter public concerns about violations of privacy by pointing out that they use the system to catch criminals. 

Another new feature will give law enforcement agencies the ability to choose which kinds of criminal offenses they are willing to share with other municipalities, according to the report. 

“For example, City A could allow City B to search its cameras for a stolen vehicle or violent crime while blocking searches related to immigration enforcement,” the company said.

Concerns over violations of privacy and storing data long term have, in part, fueled backlash against the technology. Mayor Glen Jacobs of Knox County, Tennessee has become a prominent voice calling for a national moratorium on the spread of Flock’s cameras.

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has also criticized the spread of the technology, and said in a statement the reforms “seem to be a thinly veiled PR attempt to counter communities’ genuine privacy concerns with its mass surveillance system with largely hollow security promises rather than an earnest effort to address them.”

Backlash has also been driven by reports of some law enforcement officers using the technology to stalk romantic partners. Some of the reforms are aimed at preventing that type of abuse, the company said. 

“A recently released framework called Audit Assistance flags abnormal search behavior. Previously, the feature was optional, with Flock reporting that a third of agencies turned it on,” according to the report.

The company said it is now “making it standard for every law enforcement customer. When a system detects abnormal activity, the user is locked out in real time until an administrator reviews the searches. Flock is moving to more proactively address and root out misuse of technology.” The company said it will also require a reason for every search. 

The company rolled out an optional case code requirement in July 2025; however, the new update will make case codes mandatory for searches. There will be an override option for “genuine emergencies,” like missing children, the company said.

“A search without a reason is a search that shouldn’t happen in the first place, and now Flock’s system automatically treats it that way,” Flock told the outlet. 

In the face of widespread concerns, the company still maintains that the technology helped locate approximately 10,000 missing people out of the 1 million investigations it was involved in last year.

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The Right To Be Left Alone

“The makers of our Constitution undertook to secure conditions favorable to the pursuit of happiness… They conferred against the Government the right to be let alone — most comprehensive of rights and the right most valued by civilized men.” ~ Justice Louis D. Brandeis (1856-1941)

The rapid spread of public surveillance cameras represents something far more consequential than a new piece of police technology. It represents a fundamental change in the relationship between the individual and the state.

These cameras allow government agents to record, identify, catalog and retroactively track the movements of people who have committed no crime, are suspected of no wrongdoing and have done nothing to invite government scrutiny. That’s not public safety. It’s an assault upon individual privacy.

Privacy is not a privilege granted by government. It is an aspect of personal liberty that government exists to protect. It is a natural human right protected from the government in the Bill of Rights. The fact that a person leaves his home and travels upon a public road does not mean that he has surrendered that right.

There is an enormous moral and constitutional difference between a police officer who happens to observe a person in public and government surveillance that automatically and systematically records that person’s vehicle, location and movements; and stores that information for future use.

A free society doesn’t just protect people from crime; it protects them from arbitrary government. The presumption is liberty. Government is the negation of liberty. A person should not have to establish his innocence before the government leaves him alone. The burden always belongs to the government to justify all intrusions into personal liberty. Police cameras reverse that principle. They collect information about everyone the camera views and leave it to individuals to challenge the collections afterward.

The Constitution requires articulable suspicion connecting the person being surveilled to a legitimate law-enforcement objective to justify public surveillance. A vague assertion that the technology might someday help solve a crime or enhance public safety does not meet that standard.

The view that personal privacy and public safety are in equipoise — that they are merely two competing interests of equal moral and legal weight from which government officials are entitled to choose subjectively their preferred balance — is the core of authoritarianism.

Safety is one of the legitimate purposes for which government exists. Privacy is among the personal liberties that government exists to protect. It cannot be taken away without judicial approval. Government cannot justify violating a natural right merely by asserting that doing so might make people safer. If that were so, there would be no meaningful boundary on any governmental power.

There is a profound difference between investigating a specific crime through constitutionally authorized surveillance and constructing a permanent infrastructure of suspicionless surveillance. The former begins with evidence and seeks information relevant to a particular governmental purpose. The latter begins with everyone and waits for the evidence.

When 7,000 American police departments have these systems with no legislative approvals, we have the police making policy judgments. They are deciding that the government should possess a new capacity to observe innocent people, what information should be collected, how long it should be retained, who should have access to it and what purposes may justify searches; all this irrespective of the Constitution.

Those are not merely administrative questions. They are questions about personal liberty.

If elected legislators believe that such surveillance is necessary, they should publicly debate it, enact specific legislation mandating warrants, establish meaningful limitations and accept responsibility before the voters. The decision should not be buried in a police procurement process or treated as an ordinary equipment purchase.

Liberty cannot depend upon the benevolence, restraint or good intentions of government employees. The premise of the Constitution is that government power must be limited, checked and divided because government officials are human beings who possess power and will inevitably have incentives to abuse it.

The answer is not better government surveillance. The answer is what the Fourth Amendment requires: No government surveillance without search warrants.

The constitutional question cannot be reduced to whether someone was physically standing in a public place. A police officer seeing a car pass by is one thing. A government database capable of reconstructing months of a person’s movements is something fundamentally different.

The difference is the difference between observation and surveillance.

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A WORLD OF SPOOKS: Germany Approves New Sweeping Powers for Intelligence Services, Leading to Fears of Mass Surveillance

Can Germany beef up its intel game without treading on constitutional protections?

We have been reporting since late last year on TGP about how Germany, besides being engaged in an overhaul of its armed forces, is also working to upgrade its intelligence capabilities to face the dangerous new world that we’re living in.

So, today (12), the German cabinet approved new powers for its intelligence services to ‘hack communications and disrupt foreign adversaries’ ​operations’.

Reuters reported:

“The measures, which ‌have been under discussion for months, would allow both the BND, the foreign intelligence service, and the BfV, the domestic security service, broader authority to access digital communications, collect data and carry out active operations to thwart attacks.

Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said the measures, which would ​incorporate artificial intelligence tools, would ‘revolutionize Germany’s security architecture’.

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No Fourth Amendment In American Airports?

Do you, as an American citizen, have to hand over your cell phone — along with the access code to open it — upon a (warrantless) demand by a border agent at the airport?

There’s a case grinding through the courts about that right now because one man, a Mr. Sam Tunick, refused.  

Not only did he refuse but he had an app on his phone that triggered its erasure once you keyed in a particular code to open it.  That was the code he gave CBP (Customs and Border Patrol) when they demanded his code to open it.  And then his phone was, indeed, erased right there on the spot, in the hands of the CBP agent.

That’s when CBP got really p***ed off.

According to the reporting on his case, this man was not a criminal.  He was not under suspicion or surveillance for anything, so far as we know. He is not related to Spencer Tunick, an artist who famously creates mass nude photo shoots in public places. He was, in point of fact, a left-wing activist with environmental interests, but, again, without any contact with or prior interest from law enforcement that we know of.

He was just a guy.  Coming home from an international trip (the Dominican Republic.).

You may well be thinking, “A left-wing activist with an erasure code?  Sounds suspicious!”

Let me pause to explain why I don’t think so.

A “right-winger” I know just traveled internationally recently and she traveled with a burner phone to avoid exactly this kind of search in another country.  It was England specifically.  

In England there is no Fourth Amendment and they can search your phone when you land.  They also have no First Amendment and they have terrible censorship laws now.  You can be arrested and jailed for social media posts.  Even some perfectly benign ones, like “Islam is incompatible with Liberty” — that kind of thing.

The Dominican Republic also has no Fourth Amendment and if they simply suspect you have contraband or are engaged in some other illegal activity (so a very wide berth), they have every right to inspect your phone.  Maybe this young man just didn’t want the hassle. Maybe this app was this “left-winger’s” choice instead of a burner, and in the heat of the moment, decided to deploy it once facing our own CPB here in the U.S.

In short, I don’t find it suspicious at all knowing the legal overreach climate we are living in now.  And we certainly can’t be searching American citizens and seizing their devices based on politics alone.  I hope we can all agree on that.

Back to the case:

One attorney, Mike Fox of the Cato Institute characterized Mr. Tunick’s situation this way: “This is new, uncharted territory.”

The Supreme Court has never ruled on your Fourth Amendment rights as they specifically relate to your cell phone at American airports/border crossings.  They have ruled on whether or not your phone is searchable in the interior of the United States and the answer is “no” — not without a warrant.

But somehow an American in an American airport on American soil has to surrender his rights to an American customs agent?  What is this sorcery?

Let’s review the Fourth Amendment, in its entirety:

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

The Supreme Court has ruled on Fourth Amendment exceptions at border crossings, but not cell phones in particular.  That’s why you have to go through customs and scanners and open your luggage, etc.  We’ve all been doing it forever without a thought.

But your phone ought to be a separate matter entirely, containing as it does, your digital “papers and effects.”  According to the available reporting, there was no “probable cause” to search Mr. Tunick. CPB wasn’t looking for anything specific, which is what a warrant would demand.  They just wanted to go out on a scenic drive, seeing what they could see on his phone.

Hell. No.

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