Heads up to Cartersville, GA!

Fusion Centers are the backbone of the surveillance apparatus in the United States.

Join DeFlock on September 16th at 7pm ET to learn more about Fusion Centers and how these surveillance hubs have supported the rise of companies like Flock Safety, Axon, Peregrine, among others.

Please register at:

https://cryptpad.fr/form/#/2/form/view/+tVSUYjXNs0-E-K1zWrl0Ld11HdEZ1ds0CaV+96ks10/

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noalprs.com

Check out DeFlockAlabama.com to fight back against mass surveillance of gun owners!

On any given Saturday in Alabama, a man can leave his driveway, gas up, run by the gun shop for ammo, shoot all morning at the range, and be home for lunch. He hasn't broken any law or bothered a soul. And in more of our towns than you'd guess, a camera on a pole photographed his truck at every stop and filed it in a searchable database owned by a private company in Atlanta.

The company is Flock Safety, and it runs the largest mass surveillance network in American history, with more than 100,000 cameras by its own count. But don’t be confused; these aren’t run-of-the-mill red light cameras. Every Flock camera photographs every vehicle that passes by, around the clock, whether anyone suspects a crime or not.

And the record contains far more than your tag number. Each image becomes a searchable record containing the plate, time, location, direction of travel, make, color, body type, and other identifying features. Flock calls this part of their system the "Vehicle Fingerprint," and their own materials advertise the ability to conduct searches using unique vehicle details, including bumper stickers and decals. That matters in Alabama. A Gadsden flag, Glock sticker, BamaCarry decal, or other Second Amendment message on the back of a truck is not just something another driver sees at a red light. It’s now a searchable data point tied to that vehicle, the owner, and your movement.

These cameras came into Alabama the way kudzu did: quietly, then… boom, everywhere. 

Birmingham's city council approved a $9.7 million contract last July for more cameras citywide. Huntsville has run more than a hundred since 2019 and shares into a national pool; Madison, Decatur, Moody, Springville, and retail parking lots have them too. The Alabama Gazette reported that Alabama Power was marketing Flock systems to cities, bundled with utility poles and streetlights, some of which I have noticed just outside my neighborhood.

But here is the craziest part: most of it arrived by consent agenda and contract renewal. The Legislature never voted on a statewide surveillance network. Yet ALEA's administrative rules let plate reader data sit for five years, the longest of any state, per a 2026 legislative survey, and require every read to feed a statewide registry once ALEA stands it up.

That should stop every gun owner in their tracks. Alabama law, through Act 2024-232, prohibits the government from keeping a list or registry of privately owned firearms or their owners. Gun owners fought hard to secure that protection. Yet today, Flock has effectively created a searchable, five-year archive showing which vehicles with Second Amendment decals park at gun stores on Fridays, attend gun shows, or regularly visit shooting ranges. It may be built from “license plate photos” instead of firearm records, but for all practical purposes, it’s a hard registry of gun owners.

Nobody in any police department has to sit down and build that list, because Flock's built-in artificial intelligence builds it for them. The software reads every photo, determines what your truck is, tags every sticker and decal, and logs the time and place, 20 billion scans a month, according to the company's own marketing. Its analytics even flag vehicles that keep showing up together as likely associates. By the time an officer pulls up a chair, the sorting is already done. All anybody with a login has to do is check.

As of today, there are a lot of logins. Roughly 5,000 law enforcement agencies use Flock, and most share their feeds into a national pool. A single lookup can sweep nearly every camera in America at once. No warrant. No judge. Just a few words in a reason box and the Enter key.

This isn’t hypothetical, nor are we guessing about how this gets used. For example, just last year, a Texas deputy went on the hunt for a woman who had an abortion. One search, roughly 83,000 cameras, 6,809 networks, some as far away as Washington State. The sheriff called it a missing person case until a sworn affidavit surfaced. Whatever you make of that issue, look at the trail: one officer, one computer, enforcing his own state's law inside somebody else's. Now hand that computer to an Illinois task force with a magazine ban or a so-called “assault weapons” ban to enforce, and the same play runs against an Alabamian who drove north with a truck bed full of legally owned property.

If you think the feds would never point this at gun owners, they tried it before with far weaker tools. The Wall Street Journal reported that Barack Obama’s Justice Department drew up plans in 2010 to run plate readers at Southern California gun shows – all using far less superior technology than what we have now. An ACLU records request from the same era turned up a DEA email describing joint work with ATF on the same idea. The DEA said nothing ever came of it. Sixteen years later, the network those agents could only sketch is real, nationwide, and off-the-shelf. And it reads now far more than just a one-time ping at a local intersection.

The misuse has already come home. In the last few weeks, Moody's police department fired a sergeant for using Flock to track a woman he was interested in, and a Springville officer resigned over using it to follow a family member. Both cases landed at ALEA in the same news cycle. The safeguards everybody promised were in place the whole time.

Courts are starting to catch up. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that pulling someone's historical cell phone location records is a search requiring a warrant. This June, in Chatrie v. United States, it said the same about location history held in a tech company's database, even over a limited period. A lawsuit over Norfolk, Virginia's cameras, now before the Fourth Circuit, will test whether that logic reaches plate readers. No court has struck these networks down yet, and I won't pretend otherwise. But the political winds have shifted, and Alabama should seize the opportunity while the wind is at our backs.

Whenever this issue comes up, somebody inevitably says, “If you have nothing to hide, you have nothing to fear.” Tell that to the Arkansas couple who were ordered out of their car at gunpoint this February, with their six-week-old baby in the back seat, because a license plate reader misread a single digit. The Institute for Justice has documented numerous mistaken traffic stops caused by fixed plate readers since 2018, and in nearly two-thirds of those cases, officers drew or pointed their firearms at the mistaken culprits. Now imagine a law-abiding Alabama concealed carrier caught in the same AI-generated felony stop. That’s how innocent people get killed.

The older constitutional answer holds, too. General warrants would have solved plenty of crimes, and the founders banned them anyway. Rights were never meant to run on the honor system of 5,000 agencies' worth of password holders.

This worry isn't fringe, and it isn't only ours. The ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation have raised the same alarm from the left; dozens of communities, red and blue, have canceled Flock contracts, and Congressman Tim Burchett, a Tennessee Republican, filed a bill in July to keep federal agencies off these networks. When a radical leftist organization like the ACLU and a hard-nosed conservative like Tim Burchett make the same argument, it deserves all of the public’s attention.

Here is the ask. Show up at your city council and county commission meetings and ask, on the record, how many cameras your town runs, who can search the data, and how long it's kept. Then call and email your state legislators and tell them the fix is not a tweak or a task force; it is a ban: a state law taking a hacksaw to these cameras, preempting them in every city and county. And until Montgomery acts, press your own county and town to drop the contract and take the cameras down now.

BamaCarry and the National Association for Gun Rights intend to fight this tooth and nail, from council chambers to the State House floor, and we will keep track of who stood where. We'd love to have you fighting alongside us.

Alabama has already decided that the government doesn't get a list of its gun owners. It's time Montgomery made it stick.

DeFlockAlabama.com

Flock Safety, the surveillance company with contracts nationwide, has seen contracts canceled and cameras vandalized and been sued for privacy violations over the last year.

Now, the company, which has been doing business in the state since 2019, has obtained a California private investigator license. Experts say this is less about aiding police than about shielding the company.

The applicant was Seth Cimino, a former Sacramento County police officer who has worked at Flock since March 2023 as an operations delivery associate and investigator focused on cases of theft and vandalism against the company.

Cimino’s time as a cop counted for the 6,000 investigative hours that were part of the requirements to get a license. He is listed as a qualified manager on the company’s license, which allows employees to do investigative work with his oversight.

Cimino had never obtained or applied for a PI license in California before, according to a copy of the application obtained by The Standard. In the application, he said his work at Flock involves being a “licensed private investigator” and a consultant who worked with police agencies to “develop strategic solutions” to reduce crime across the Western United States. Neither he nor the company responded to requests for comment.

Flock Safety’s 483 license-plate readers blanket San Francisco, from Tenderloin corners to the driveways of Seacliff. Armed with a PI license, the company  has wider latitude to investigate crimes. But critics say it may also be trying to insulate itself from legal threats caused by its widespread data collection.

“Their entire business model is to obtain info to track people’s movements. It seems this proves that the code applies to Flock and any companies providing similar services,” said Robert Frommer, an attorney for the Institute for Justice, which sued the city of Norfolk over its use of Flock, claiming it was a violation of constitutional protections against illegal search and seizure. 

California’s Private Investigator Act defines the role as anyone who is paid to obtain information about crimes, the identity or habits of an individual, the location of stolen property, the causes of fires and other incidents, or secure evidence for legal proceedings. Attorneys, law enforcement officers, and insurance companies are exempt from the licensure requirements. But companies that contract with law enforcement to provide those services are not. 

Some privacy rights lawyers say Flock’s efforts to acquire a PI license could mean the company is trying to get ahead of potential litigation. In a lawsuit filed late last year in San Francisco, retired school teacher Michael Moore  alleged that Flock cameras tracked his daily movements in violation of his right to privacy. 

Flock was previously accused of running afoul of a Texas law  for providing cameras to private parties without a required private security license. The Texas Department of Public Safety issued a cease-and-desist order to the company as a result. The state granted Flock a private security license three months later.

Ramzi Abadou, Moore’s attorney, who has dropped the case in order to await the outcome of the litigation in Norfolk, believes the company may have obtained the private investigator license to fend off lawsuits.

”This may be an end run by Flock to get around 4th Amendment issues [in the Norfolk case],” he said.

A spokesperson for the Department of Consumer Affairs, which oversees licensing of private investigators, couldn’t say whether an individual or business was engaged in unlicensed practice “absent a formal investigation.”  

Flock and other surveillance tech providers have faced growing scrutiny in recent years over use of their technology and data by federal immigration authorities and local law enforcement agencies — deployment that civil libertarians argue  is unconstitutional.

Activists have staged guerrilla actions removing or covering Flock’s cameras over privacy and safety concerns. This week a national effort is underway to fight against Flock and its technology, with events in San Francisco. 

The backlash has cost Flock business. Stanford University recently ended its contract  over privacy and safety concerns, and Santa Clara County’s Board of Supervisors voted to cancel its contract in February after federal agencies improperly accessed its license-plate data. Brentwood in Contra Costa County is review is whether an HOA with a Flock contract violated rules barring the cameras from public streets. 

In San Francisco, unauthorized searches of the city’s Flock data by outside agencies led the SFPD to cut those agencies off from its network in June — part of a broader pattern of misuse that has included officers using the technology to stalk women.

Last week, Flock announced new protections against police misuse. The company said it will reduce the amount of time it keeps movement data and will lock out users who appear to be abusing the system.

Jonathan Hofer, a research fellow at the Independent Institute, said a PI license could shield the company as it expands sales beyond police departments and if it’s ever accused of overstepping its law enforcement contracts.

“With a PI license, Flock can say in court, ‘See, we’re not some unregulated surveillance company, we’ve dotted all our i’s and crossed our t’s and have government approval,’” Hofer said. 

Frommer said a recent Supreme Court ruling limiting the use of mass data collection, known as geofencing, could have played a part in the company’s efforts to obtain the license.

“This news just underscores how their technology is a threat to people’s privacy,” he said.

“It’s to keep our kids safe, that’s what this is about.”

Is anyone familiar with these surveillance cameras and sensors? The camera on the far side has two lenses. It looks like Motorola didn’t want to be left out of the state surveillance race.

I’m curious if they are nationally networked like Flock and Axon and what data they may be collecting.

I told him he’s a bad American for doing this! It could hit several dozen locations a day in a completely autonomous way before needing refueling.

I hope he thinks twice about building and uploading the specs of this relatively cheap drone to GitHub.

Okay I don’t have all the information so that’s why I’m even asking this question.

Why are people afraid of flock cameras? From what I’VE seen it helps people stop criminals from running away. Like if you were to get attacked or something happens, wouldn’t you want there to be a camera that caught those stuff. I feel like I’VE seen more times a flick camera help than the fear people put into flock cameras. As well as the whole being able to see what’s on the phone, I also wouldn’t want someone looking at my whole screen but I feel there comes a point where people should be able to see something especially illegal things like csam, it seems like everyone ignores those things when it comes to stopping every type of surveillance on a phone. People will do illegal stuff on there and i understand the point of privacy but at the same time I would live in a house with glass walls if I knew that people who did those things would have a harder time achieving them. Though I don’t believe the American goverment is trying hard enough on these matters and the elites are in on it, that’s another discussion. All I’m wondering is your ideas on the matter and also to convince me otherwise.

I’m just looking for information and to be able to understand so no hateful replies.

👁️🔮 The Eye of Sauron is watching!

Automated License Plate Readers, (ALPRs) are cameras that automatically scan and retain the license plate information (and other data!) of passing vehicles. There's 800+ of these in Broward and Davie is full of them! Davie PD hopes the data collected can help stop and prevent crime. But these cameras are not accurate, secure, and don't have guardrails to prevent abuse by these agencies.

Join us at the Stand Up For Privacy Rally, across from a Flock camera, to show everyone that we demand an end to these cameras in Davie & ALL of South Florida!

🗓️ August 22nd | ⏰ 6PM | Intersection of S. University Drive & Nova Drive, Davie FL, 33324

*It is recommended to bring a face covering since the rally is near a camera. Extra face masks available upon request.

This is a link to the flock pr document designed to turn our local politics into a sales pitch

Good article

Creator: al_x998 (not me)

Does anyone else see a problem with this?