Mass Surveillance to Stop... Loud Music?

Our Take

Credit where it's due: EFF just put plain language to something we've been tracking for a while — the gap between how Flock Safety and its police partners sell ALPR networks and how those cameras actually get used. "Stop violent crime" is the pitch. Logging cars because someone blasted music too loud is the reality. That's not a glitch in the system. That's the system working exactly as a dragnet is designed to work: once the infrastructure exists, every department finds a reason to query it.

This is the core problem with license plate surveillance that budget hearings never capture. Nobody votes to approve a camera network for noise complaints. They vote for it after a scary headline about carjackings or Amber Alerts, and then the audit logs show the thing getting used for everything from toll evasion to, apparently, somebody's stereo. Every one of those queries is a data point feeding a permanent record of where your car has been, whether or not you ever did anything close to what the cameras were originally sold to catch.

Go check our map and see how many of these cameras are already sitting on roads near you, then use our take-action guide if you want to push back at your next city council meeting.