https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2025/apr/16/keeping-l...
https://www.muckrock.com/news/archives/2024/mar/27/automatin...
https://youtube.com/watch?v=pX_xcj-p0vA
Apparently there is scraping of public data + keyword matching + moderators filtering the matches.
An example that he shows a bit earlier in the video comes from this page, which has an RSS feed: https://www.cityofsanbenito.com/AgendaCenter/City-Commission...
The video says it's open source but I can't find the source.
https://www.king5.com/article/news/investigations/investigat...
Like what are we doing as a society? Stop trying to build the surveilance nexus from sci fi. I don't want to live in a zero-crime world [1]. It's not worth it. Safety third, there is always gonna be some risk.
[0] https://www.cbsnews.com/colorado/news/flock-cameras-lead-col...
[1] Edit to add: if this raises hackles, I encourage folks to think through what true zero crime (or maybe lets call it six-nines lawfulness) entails. If we had literal precrime, would that stop 99.9999% of crime? (hint: read the book/watch the movie)
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
first the came for the turkeys...
I'm just happy for any sort of critical analysis or attention being brought to every municipality's use of this technology as so often people have no idea at all, though. Because there are a lot of counties which are far worse, and almost none of the public is even aware; I suspect there is at least some gap between people who would care if they knew, and people who care now.
[0]: https://alpranalysis.com/virginia/206807
[1]: https://transparency.flocksafety.com/williamsburg-va-pd
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
This video here literally catches a K-9 officer faking a drug hit just to harass this guy over an expired inspection sticker. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cv5kXxiJiMA
The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.
https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml...
- The framework for crawling is open-source. https://github.com/civicband
- There is absolutely not a standardized API for nearly any of this. I build generalized crawlers when I can, and then build custom crawlers when I need.
- Can you let me know which city? The crawlers run for every municipality at least once every day, so that's probably a bug
I also track Puerto Rico, but only at the Senate level: https://senado.pr.civic.band/
I also gave a talk on this concept that walks through the whole process: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MtWzNnZvQ6w
The short answer is: there's no common API for any of these sites, and even the ones that do have an API are sometimes misconfigured. It's why I wrote all the scrapers by hand.
I found it really interesting he frames privacy, surveillance, and power through the lens of information asymmetries.
Absolutely agree... but the CA law is clear that tracking license plates get special treatment! It being public space doesn't matter. It's wild to me that how you analyze the video is regulated. Also that no similar regulation for the regular public doing facial recognition exists. Just ALPR.
I wonder how I'm supposed to comply with the law if I were to take a public webcam feed, like one from a highway[0], and run ALPR on it myself. I obviously can't post any notices there. And I'm not the camera operator so can't comply with anything related to that. But I would be doing ALPR which does require I follow rules. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Will be interesting to see what happens to the law. It feels outdated, but I'm doubtful any CA politician is going to expend karma making ALPR more permissive. So I bet it'll stay on the books and just go largely unenforced.
This is what "Oh By Codes"[1] are for.
Instead of trying to paint a QR code, which is difficult, you can just chalk a 6 character code.
Further, you can create them on the fly without using a special tool - just a textarea on a simple webpage.
You can encode up to 4096 characters or a single URL redirect.
[1] https://0x.co
I've thought that license plates themselves are such a persistent unique identifier, but one that we sort of didn't notice until the recognition and storage technologies got cheaper.
The original motivation for license plates seems to be about enforcing safety inspections of cars (maybe also liability insurance?). Nowadays we also have a lot of other uses that have piled up. The top two I think are very popular: allowing victims of crimes involving motor vehicles to identify the vehicles reliably, and allowing police to catch fugitives in vehicular pursuits. Maybe these were actually even considered part of the original motivation for license plate requirements. Below that, still fairly popular, you have allowing non-moving violation citations such as parking tickets; allowing police to randomly notice wanted persons' vehicles that happen to be nearby; and allowing government agencies another enforcement lever for other stuff by threatening to cancel previously-issued plates. (Oh yeah, and nowadays also paying for parking online!)
I could imagine more modern approaches that would put more technological limitations on some of these things, but I guess any change would be controversial not least because you're intentionally taking some data away from law enforcement (which I think is a normal thing to want to do). The one that's really hard is the "victims of crimes easily identifying vehicles". If you replace license plates with something that's not easily to memorize or write down, the reporting gets a lot harder.
Maybe we could try to have license plates change frequently using something like format-preserving encryption (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Format-preserving_encryption) so they still appear like existing license plate formats, and then prevent law enforcement agents or agencies from directly receiving the decryption keys, so they have to actively interact with the plate issuer in order to answer specific investigative questions about specific vehicles. If police receive a report of a crime they can ask to find out what the involved vehicle's displayed plate will change to on specific dates.
This would have the problem that a partial or mistranscribed or misremembered plate would be pretty useless (you couldn't easily search for, or detect, a partial plate match). You could add some error correcting codes to the plate numbers, but I don't think existing plate numbers are long enough for that. Also, if the plate numbers didn't change very frequently, you could probably partially deanonymize ALPR datasets based on recurring patterns of locations over time.
The best lesson is probably that, if you make a new technical system, you should be very cautious about the identifiers that go into that system, as they may still exist decades later, and used for new kinds of tracking and new kinds of surveillance that you didn't anticipate.
We track City Councils, Boards of Supervisors, really any municipality we can get our hands on. I'm very open to how to make this better!
There are already stories of abuse, here are a few: https://www.aclu-wi.org/news/what-the-flock-police-surveilla... (Many more can be found with a quick Google search.)
Sure, the House is almost evenly split, so a few seats here or there would have an impact. But the net result would probably be further mitigated by gerrymandering, other population shifts, and so on.
One other thing I appreciated from this article is how it touches on comments about simply following the law. Just because something is legal, does not make it morally questionable (at best). From the article:
> The apportionment of seats in Congress is required by the U.S. Constitution, which says that the census will be used to divide the House of Representatives “among the several States according to their respective numbers, counting the whole number of persons in each State,” except for enslaved people, who, until the late 1800s, were counted as three-fifths of a person, and certain American Indians.
And this post uses wire screen to make a stencil https://www.instructables.com/Simple-QR-Code-Spray-Paint-Ste...
The YouTube account is no longer around, but you can still watch it on archive.org: https://web.archive.org/web/20190220131525/https://www.youtu...
https://nypost.com/2025/12/11/us-news/sf-rapper-dreamllife-r...
Mentions "flock" when referring to a flock of turkeys - not flock cameras
https://apnews.com/article/chinese-surveillance-silicon-vall...
The way I see it, there are bad people everywhere (even in the government).
https://local12.com/news/nation-world/police-chief-gets-caug...
And, in a safe country like this one (I am in the United States but most developed countries are pretty safe), if a little petty crime is so scary to them that they need a mass surveillance network to sleep at night... I don't see any reason why the public should have to sacrifice potential freedoms for that weakness.
> Surveillance under Surveillance shows you cameras and guards — watching you — almost everywhere.
https://civic.observer/auth/login
I am interested in monitoring local legislation in Clark County, WA