Tag: mass surveillance

Georgia Cops Keep Getting Arrested And Fired For Illegally Using Flock Cameras To Stalk People, But Surely Those 17 Bad Apples Aren’t Representative Of The Entire Bunch

“Another Georgia cop accused of misusing Flock data in growing trend,” the USA Today headline reads. If you remember now-former Braselton police chief Michael Steffman’s arrest on stalking charges last year, it would be understandable if you assumed CBS News meant a second Georgia officer had been arrested for misusing Flock’s license plate data to stalk their victims. There couldn’t be that many bad cops getting arrested in one state, right? Well, that depends on whether your definition of “not that many” because USA Today reports that at least 17 Georgia cops have been accused of Flock-stalking in just the last couple of months. 

Former Sergeant Kabiru Salawu lost the job he’d held with the DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office since 2009, after he was arrested over allegations that he engaged in “unauthorized use of the agency’s Flock Safety technology.” Salawu currently faces a felony charge for violating his oath of office, but in Georgia, misuse of license plate data is charged as a misdemeanor. For now, the sheriff’s office hasn’t released any information on how it caught Salawu, nor have they explained what he’s accused of using Flock’s system to do.

According to CBS News, Salawu’s arrest brings the total number of law enforcement officers accused of abusing their access to the private surveillance system that tracks everyone everywhere all the time, even if you don’t drive a car or have a license plate visible, to 10 “in recent weeks.” Not months or years. Weeks. As internal audits continue, don’t be surprised to see those numbers rise in the coming weeks, either. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, and if internal audits turned up enough evidence to charge 17 officers over the last several months, it stands to reason that ongoing investigations will turn up evidence of even more abuses within the Georgia law enforcement community.

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Flock-Powered Police Chiefs Stalking Women Shows Why Warrants Are Needed

While Flock claims its system tracks vehicles, not people, the documented record of police chiefs stalking ex-partners through Flock shows otherwise. When the most experienced, highest-ranking officers in law enforcement, the people most responsible for enforcing the rules, demonstrate ongoing abuses, the answer is the same courts have given for each generation of powerful tracking technology: require a warrant first.

The police chief of Holiday Hills, Illinois, and a part-time officer at Prairie Grove Police Department, was arrested June 18, 2026, and charged with two counts of official misconduct, a Class 3 felony.

Prosecutors alleged he used Prairie Grove’s Flock license plate reader system and the Illinois State Police LEADS database to track six people he knew personally.

Three of those people were women the chief had been in romantic relationships with, according to prosecutors at his arraignment. He also tracked an ex-boyfriend of one of those women, running that man’s plate 140 times over several months, a figure the protective order petition put at 178, with 86 of those searches conducted while off duty.

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The Fourth Amendment Is Being Liquidated by Subscription

The black pole does not look like tyranny.

That is the point.

It looks like street furniture. A small black camera. A solar panel. A utility box. Nothing dramatic. No uniformed officer standing beside it. No marked police vehicle. No flashing lights. No warrant presented to the driver. In many communities, there was barely any public debate before it appeared.

Yet the device photographs nearly every vehicle that passes. It reads the license plate, records the time and location, identifies the make, model and color, and may catalogue distinctive features such as bumper stickers, roof racks, dents, scratches and damage. That information is uploaded into a cloud platform where police can search for vehicles across time and geography. [1]

The government once needed detectives, informants, stakeouts and court orders to follow someone across a city.

Now it can type a plate number into a privately operated dashboard.

Flock Safety calls this public safety.

A more accurate description is a privately administered ledger of American movement.

This is not merely a story about one overly ambitious technology company. Flock is the case study, but the real subject is the creation of a public-private surveillance regime in which corporations collect the data, venture capital finances the infrastructure, local governments purchase access, federal agencies find side doors into the system, and ordinary citizens are told that none of this is particularly concerning because they were technically visible while driving on a public road.

The state did not formally repeal the Fourth Amendment.

It outsourced its erosion.

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An Explosion of Surveillance Towers is Coming to U.S. Borders, Costing Over $1 Billion

A new report from the Government Accounting Office reveals that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) plans to nearly triple the number of surveillance towers along U.S. borders, from the current 830 to 2,300 by 2034.

DHS expects to expend $1 billion in taxpayer dollars for this dangerous expansion of a surveillance network indiscriminately trained on towns, school playgrounds, backyards, and vehicles—threatening the privacy and civil liberties of everyone in the border regions.

The towers are planned as part of DHS component Customs and Border Protection’s (CBP) Integrated Surveillance Tower (IST) program, which captures images of people and vehicles. The IST program operates autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of autonomous surveillance towers, consisting of AI-based systems using radar, thermal infrared and optical systems to track targets over long distances; integrated fixed towers, optimized for surveilling foot traffic and vehicles; and remote video surveillance systems, which can often be found very close to the border fence in Arizona, including residential neighborhoods where cameras are capable of spying on homes on both sides of the border. (For a description and photos of these technologies, see EFF’s updated guide to surveillance at the U.S.-Mexico Border.)

DHS expects to purchase more long-range autonomous towers and to upgrade existing towers with autonomous capabilities. The $1 billion comes from the so-called One Big Beautiful Act—a massive tax and spending law that President Trump signed in 2025, the report says.

The explosive expansion of border surveillance is a digital dumpster fire for human rights and civil liberties. It’s not just surveillance towers; drones, aerostats, surveillance vehicles, ground sensors, game cameras, and license plate readers are also part of the vast taxpayer-funded infrastructure that threatens all those who live, work, or seek refuge in the borderlands. This technology isn’t exclusive to U.S. federal agencies: it’s also deployed by state and local law enforcement, and even by governments on the Mexican side.

Since 2022, EFF has studied and mapped surveillance technology along the U.S.-Mexico border using public records research, open-source intelligence, and fact-finding trips, and created a handy interactive map to provide researchers and journalists with the tools they need to analyze the impact of U.S. border security policy. We have also documented the different types of surveillance technology in a zine, “Surveillance Technology at the U.S.-Mexico Border.” We updated the publication earlier this year to help people identify the machinery of homeland security by adding more models of surveillance towers, newly deployed military tech, and a gallery of disguised trail cams and automated license plate readers.

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Ga. police supervisor arrested after Flock audit, department says

Yet another metro Atlanta law enforcement member has been arrested for allegedly misusing the department’s Flock license plate reader system.

Paige Forte, a 30-year-old supervisor with the Conyers Police Department’s Real-Time Crime Center, allegedly used the system to search for her domestic partner’s car several times. The searches were flagged during an audit, according to police.

Rockdale County Jail records show Forte was arrested on Wednesday and charged with prohibited use of law enforcement-retained license plate data. The police department asked the Georgia Bureau of Investigation (GBI) to complete its own criminal investigation.

In its own statement, the GBI said Forte allegedly accessed the system “for non-law enforcement purposes” more than 30 times between April and July this year.

Forte has been put on administrative leave following the outcome of the police department’s internal investigation.

“The integrity of our department depends on the public’s confidence that we use technology responsibly and within the law,” Conyers Police Chief Scott Freeman said in a statement. “No employee is above the law, and we will continue to hold ourselves to the highest standards of accountability.”

Several law enforcement officers in Georgia — including three Fayetteville police officers, three Cherokee County deputies, one DeKalb County deputy and one Greene County deputy — have recently been disciplined for allegedly using their departments’ Flock systems outside of official law enforcement activity.

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America’s newest jail has no walls

Americans are looking for safety in an increasingly chaotic country. Mass immigration, collapsing social trust, and weakening civic bonds have transformed many communities from places where neighbors knew one another into anonymous zones governed by suspicion.

Technology promises an escape from the consequences of those political and cultural failures. Flock Safety cameras appear to offer law and order at the push of a button. In the hands of the ruling class that manufactured the crisis, however, they are more likely to produce tyranny for citizens.

Municipalities are buying Flock’s automated license plate readers. The company did not invent plate cameras, but its artificial intelligence radically expands their reach.

Flock cameras photograph passing vehicles and record license plates, makes, colors, damage, bumper stickers, and identifiers. A single camera means little. A citywide network collecting thousands of images every day creates something powerful.

The cameras send their information to an AI database in real time. Police and other municipal employees can search for vehicles nearby. They can place cars on “hot lists” and receive alerts whenever those vehicles appear.

The system effectively places a GPS tracker on every moving car. Police ordinarily need a warrant to attach a tracker to your vehicle. Flock can reproduce the same surveillance through a network of cameras, often without probable cause, due process, or meaningful legal restraint.

The benefits are obvious. Perfect information about every vehicle makes suspects easier to find. Police can recover stolen cars, locate fleeing murderers, and respond faster to crimes.

In a high-trust town, every grandmother on the porch once knew which cars belonged and which did not. Flock offers a technological imitation of that lost social awareness.

But imitation carries a price. Grandma knew her neighbors and exercised human judgment. The database knows everyone and answers to government employees.

Flock is not alone in selling technological substitutes for social order. Cities have used gunshot-detection systems. Networks of acoustic sensors identify gunfire and triangulate its location, allowing police to respond faster.

The engineering may be impressive. The governing theory is primitive: If authorities watch and listen to everyone constantly, they can prevent more crimes and solve more cases.

A surveillance panopticon may work. People who know they are always being watched behave differently. Americans have resisted that bargain for good reason.

The Fourth Amendment exists because efficient policing is not the highest political good. Government must possess evidence and follow procedures before invading the privacy of citizens. New technology should not erase old constitutional limits.

Britain offers a warning. Closed-circuit television cameras have become ubiquitous across the United Kingdom. Some estimates suggest that the average British resident appears on camera dozens of times each day.

Britain has no written equivalent of the Fourth Amendment, and its political culture places fewer obstacles before constant public surveillance. Yet cameras did not prevent the Rotherham grooming-gang scandal or protect thousands of vulnerable girls from organized abuse.

Officials ignored or concealed the crimes for years because confronting them threatened the ruling class’s multicultural ideology. When public anger finally erupted, the surveillance state proved far more competent at identifying and punishing citizens who protested the cover-up.

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Leon County Commissioners Unanimously Defund Flock Cameras After Packed Public Hearing

In a unanimous vote that sent shockwaves through Florida’s surveillance debate, Leon County Commissioners pulled a $440,000 agenda item that would have expanded Flock Safety license plate reader cameras throughout the county — after a packed crowd of citizens showed up to demand they do exactly that.

The funding, drawn from a regional public safety grant rather than local tax dollars, was stripped before it could be approved. Commission Chair Christian Caban made no attempt to soften the message: “I hate those damn cameras,” he told the crowd.

Speakers lined up to push back on what they called an unconstitutional surveillance dragnet. “Tracking thousands of innocent citizens who are just trying to drive to work, drop their kids off at school, or go to the grocery store is an overreach into our privacy,” said Devin Nobles, a computer engineer who addressed the Commission.

The Leon County decision is part of a rapidly growing backlash against Flock Safety across Florida. The state is home to nearly 7,500 Flock LPRs — one of the densest deployments in the country. Critics say the cameras create a “mosaic” of surveillance that effectively tracks the daily movements of innocent civilians without a warrant, without consent, and without meaningful oversight. There have also been documented instances of law enforcement officers misusing the system to track former partners, and some Flock footage has been found to be publicly accessible online.

The revolt is crossing political lines. Gubernatorial candidates Byron Donalds and James Fishback have both come out against the technology. Multiple candidates in Florida’s 2nd Congressional District race have called for an outright ban. Libertarians in Bay County held a protest last month under the banner “De-Flock Bay County.”

The tide in Florida appears to be turning — and Leon County just showed the rest of the state what a unanimous “no” looks like.

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Flock Safety’s Billion-Dollar Surveillance Machine Caught Sharing Your Data With The Feds

The Orange traffic barrel on the side of Arizona State Route 60 looked like any other piece of construction equipment. It had the same yellow-and-white striping, the same tapered shape.

It also had a camera lens carved into both sides, a solar panel, and a cellular transmitter feeding data to a private company’s servers.

License plate readers disguised as traffic barrels. Orange traffic cones with cameras inside. Speed trap signs with AI-powered sensors. This is how Flock Safety operates — a $7.5 billion surveillance company that has deployed more than 100,000 cameras across the United States, more than any law enforcement agency has ever controlled.

The company says it solves crimes. The court filings say it does something else.

1.6 Million Illegal Searches in 7 Months

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Flock Safety Defends Cameras After AI System Triggers Wrongful Police Stops Of Two Journalists

Plymouth, Minnesota – Automotive journalist Joel Feder and his wife were detained by multiple police officers in a coordinated stop while driving a Jaguar Land Rover press vehicle, after Flock Safety’s automated license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras flagged the car based on a flawed database entry.

According to Feder’s detailed account in The Drive, officers boxed in the $155,000 Range Rover in a Kohl’s parking lot after the vehicle triggered alerts via Flock’s network. Police had been tracking it for days, believing the New Jersey manufacturer plate (34 10 DTM) was stolen. Officers approached with hands on their weapons, ordered the couple out of the vehicle, and conducted pat-downs before verifying the car’s legitimacy through Jaguar Land Rover. Feder subsequently obtained and published the body camera footage of the encounter.

The incident stemmed from an incomplete report of a similar plate (34 03 DTM) lost during a photo shoot in California, which was entered into the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database simply as “34 DTM.” Flock’s AI system matched Feder’s plate – ignoring the smaller middle digits – and generated alerts. Local officers did not fully verify the complete plate visible in Flock’s own images.

The problem was not confined to one vehicle. Last Wednesday, fellow auto journalist Tim Esterdahl, publisher of Pickup Truck + SUV Talk, was pulled over by two officers in Scotts Bluff, Nebraska, while driving his 14-year-old child in a $105,000 Range Rover Sport loaned to him by Jaguar Land Rover for review. Its plate: New Jersey 34 08 DTM. Jaguar Land Rover has been working to correct the underlying reports.

Flock Safety maintains that its cameras performed as designed, matching partial plates per law enforcement preferences for hotlist alerts. Chief Communications Officer Joshua Thomas told The Drive the system was asked whether those characters were present and correctly answered that they were – it simply was not built to flag that additional characters existed. He conceded that for alerts originating from NCIC rather than an individual agency’s custom list, the system arguably should test for an exact match rather than mere presence, and called that fair feedback to take back to his team.

Thomas said Flock is working to get the original police report corrected and is meeting with the FBI officials who curate NCIC to develop a way for incomplete data to be flagged as such for officers seeing automated alerts in the field. He emphasized that a camera alert “does not equal probable cause,” comparing it to an alarm going off, and stressed that the system depends on both valid inputs and humans verifying outputs.

But the scale is what makes the error rate consequential. Thomas said the system is roughly 99 percent accurate while performing approximately 20 billion reads per month – arithmetic that leaves on the order of 200 million misreads every month. How many of those escalate into armed stops is unknown.

Plymouth police acknowledged shortcomings in verification but pointed to the challenges of varying license plate formats nationwide. According to the department’s Flock transparency portal, the city operates 18 cameras that read more than 580,000 license plates in a recent 30-day period, generating over 14,800 hotlist hits – one of which was Feder.

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FLOCK SAFETY: The Great Normalization (Nobody Declared Martial Law… Yet America Began Looking Like It Anyway)

There are stories that announce themselves with explosions, riots, or breaking-news headlines, and then there are stories so subtle that they quietly rewrite an entire society before anyone realizes what has happened. This is one of those stories. During the preparation of this investigation, several retired police officers, private security professionals, emergency responders, and ordinary citizens described nearly identical experiences despite living hundreds or even thousands of miles apart. None believed they were witnessing anything extraordinary at first. It was only when they looked backward—sometimes over a decade—that a disturbing pattern became impossible to ignore. Streets had not become military checkpoints overnight. Neighborhoods had not suddenly filled with surveillance towers. Instead, the changes arrived one camera, one drone, one security contract, and one “temporary” emergency measure at a time until extraordinary security became indistinguishable from ordinary life. What follows is not an argument against public safety, nor an attempt to romanticize a past that was hardly free from crime or violence. It is an examination of a transformation that has occurred quietly enough for most people to stop seeing it altogether.

There is an old saying among investigators that people rarely notice change while it is happening. They notice it only when they compare today’s reality with memories that have remained frozen in time. Memory preserves snapshots, while history moves continuously. That disconnect explains why so many citizens insist that nothing fundamental has changed even as the physical landscape around them becomes increasingly populated by surveillance cameras, armed guards, automated license plate readers, biometric scanners, drones, and predictive security technologies. No single installation appears revolutionary. No single policy seems capable of altering the character of a society. Yet history rarely advances through dramatic leaps. More often, it advances through thousands of small decisions that seem perfectly reasonable when viewed independently but become historically significant when examined collectively.

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