LISA FEMIA | EFF | WHAT ALPR CAMERAS CAN CAPTURE

Our Take

When an EFF staff attorney says she's never seen a match like this before, that's not a throwaway line — that's a warning shot. In this conversation with Jen, Lisa Femia describes law enforcement using ALPR footage to zoom in on people themselves, then apparently cross-referencing that imagery with what folks have posted publicly online. That's a meaningful leap from "read a plate, log a timestamp" to "identify a face, build a profile." The mission creep here isn't hypothetical anymore — it's being described by one of the few organizations actually auditing how these systems get used in practice.

Femia's answer to the obvious follow-up — should people just lock down their social media? — is the right one. The burden shouldn't fall on ordinary people to scrub their digital footprint because a surveillance network might weaponize it against them. You have a First Amendment right to post a photo of yourself in public. The problem is a system that was sold to city councils as a tool for recovering stolen cars and finding amber-alert vehicles quietly expanding into facial-matching and social media correlation, often without a public vote or even a press release.

This is exactly the kind of function creep we track at DeFlock. If a camera near you is capable of more than it was ever authorized to do, your neighbors deserve to know. Check our camera map to see what's been logged in your area, and if you want to push back on surveillance expansion in your own city, our take-action page has concrete steps to get started.