Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
Fleet 3 in-car ALPR feeding Axon Evidence — plus, since 2026, two fixed cameras: Axon Outpost and Axon Lightpost (the latter built with Ubicquia to clamp onto an existing streetlight, installable in under an hour). Both do ALPR + live video streaming into Axon Fusus. Axon is actively displacing Flock (Denver, Syracuse, Pasco County FL, Bartlesville, Douglas County CO) via its body-cam lock-in. National shared plate database: NO — agency-controlled, no cross-agency national lookup (a difference officials cite when dropping Flock); but hits flow into Axon Fusus.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
MPH-900 patrol-car mobile ALPR with real-time hotlist alerts; a long-standing law-enforcement vendor. Its parent, Leonardo, also markets SignalTrace — sensors that bolt Bluetooth/Wi-Fi/RFID device-identifier capture onto ELSAG plate readers (see capabilities). National shared plate database: NO — agency-owned hotlists.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
Tolling and roadway RFID + ALPR (acquired 3M's ANPR/PIPS); vehicle ID for tolling, not policing. National shared plate database: NO — tolling infrastructure.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
European-rooted traffic-enforcement and tolling ALPR (VECTOR cameras) — speed/red-light/average-speed enforcement. National shared plate database: NO — fixed roadway enforcement.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
A cloud 'real-time crime center' platform Axon acquired in 2024 (~$240M) that fuses ALPR hits, gunshot-detection alerts, body/in-car cameras, drones, dispatch data and public AND private security cameras into one map; its 'Core' device pulls privately-owned camera feeds into the police network for live access. Captures plates, faces-on-video and the real-time location of anyone in view of an enrolled camera. National shared plate database: NO — not one database but a network: EFF documents Fusus in 250+ agencies with 200,000+ enrolled cameras.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
Built a face-search engine by scraping billions of photos from social media and public sites without consent (company has claimed 10B+, later 60B+ faceprints). Police upload a face photo and get matching images plus source links — biometric faceprints tied to online identities. Used by ICE and the FBI (see abuses); restricted by an Illinois biometric-privacy settlement (see lawsuits). National shared plate database: YES — a single scraped biometric database of billions of faceprints, searchable by law enforcement.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
Places microphones on poles and buildings across a coverage area; acoustic sensors plus human review classify sounds as gunfire and dispatch police to precise coordinates. Captures ambient audio and the location of suspected gunfire, and its output has been used as investigative evidence. Deployed in 160+ US cities historically — though many have dropped it (see abuses). National shared plate database: NO — a per-city sensor network, not a national database.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
A point-and-click web app that lets police search commercial smartphone-location data pulled from mobile advertising IDs across 700+ apps — draw an area to see every device that was there, or track one device's 'pattern of life' — often with no warrant, for roughly $6,000–$9,000/yr. An EFF/Associated Press investigation confirmed contracts or trials with at least 18 state and local agencies; records showed some agencies did not believe Carpenter v. U.S. required a warrant for app-derived location data. National shared plate database: YES (effectively) — Fog claimed access to 250M+ US devices and 15B location signals/day from the ad-tech marketplace.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
Danish vendor whose sensors record the Wi-Fi/Bluetooth MAC address of passing devices, then encrypt and time-stamp them to measure travel and dwell times. Documented at Schiphol, JFK, Dublin, Copenhagen and Brussels airports and on road networks in Stockholm and Auckland. Marketed as anonymized traffic analytics, not identity tracking. National shared plate database: NO — the vendor states MAC IDs are hashed for aggregate traffic-flow analytics.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Vendors
A vendor-announced (Dec 2023) 'portable Bluetooth and Wi-Fi MAC Address Capture Unit… for on-the-go collection of nearby WiFi and Bluetooth MAC addresses from passing devices,' streaming to a cloud with device profiles and MAC blacklists. Digitpol states it is 'an active surveillance device… exclusively available for purchase by Government Law Enforcement Agencies.' National shared plate database: NO — a portable capture unit with an operator-run cloud.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
An official at the Johnson County, TX Sheriff's Office ran two Flock searches for a woman who had a self-managed medication abortion (April–May 2025). The second reached 6,809 networks / 83,345 cameras nationwide — including states that protect abortion. The audit-log reason field read, verbatim, 'had an abortion, search for female.' The sheriff publicly called it a welfare check; court records later showed deputies had opened a 'death investigation of a non-viable fetus' and consulted the DA about charging her the same day as the search. Source: 404 Media / EFF. Date: May–Oct 2025.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
Local and state police ran 4,000+ Flock lookups for immigration purposes — reason fields literally reading 'ICE,' 'ICE WARRANT,' 'illegal immigration' — even though Flock has no ICE contract (records via Danville, IL). CBP separately had direct backend access to 80,000+ cameras through an undisclosed pilot; the Secret Service and Navy/NCIS also had access, and some departments did not know their data was being shared. Source: 404 Media (Koebler & Cox). Date: May–Oct 2025.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
Illinois law (Public Act 103-0540) bars using ALPR data for immigration or abortion enforcement. The Secretary of State's audit found 46 out-of-state agencies searched Illinois data illegally, that Mount Prospect's data was queried 262 times for immigration reasons, and — in a follow-up — that Flock had granted CBP access via an undisclosed pilot in violation of state law. Source: Illinois Secretary of State. Date: June–Sept 2025.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
Documented cases show officers using Flock to stalk romantic interests — a Sedgwick, KS police chief searched his ex 164 times and her new boyfriend 64 times (228 searches). Audits found over 20% of Austin PD's ALPR searches had no case number, and in a dataset of 11.4 million Flock searches, 14%+ of the 'reason' fields were just the word 'investigation.' Source: Institute for Justice / Austin Chronicle / ACLU. Date: 2024–2026.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
At least 60 Flock 'Condor' cameras were streaming live to the open internet with no password — exposing live feeds, 30 days of archived video, and admin controls (a reporter filmed himself on a public feed). Device flaw CVE-2025-59403 is rated 9.8 (critical). Lawmakers asked the FTC why Flock doesn't enforce multi-factor authentication after stolen police logins were found for sale. Source: 404 Media / NIST NVD. Date: Sept–Dec 2025.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
The Institute for Justice documented at least 26 cases since 2018 of motorists wrongly detained — often at gunpoint — due to ALPR errors, most since 2023. A Flock one-letter misread in Sherwood, AR flagged a family's SUV as stolen; they were stopped at gunpoint with a ~6-week-old infant in the car. Comparable ALPR-error cases settled for $1.9M (Aurora, CO) and $495K (San Francisco). Source: Institute for Justice / EFF. Date: 2024–2026.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
Chicago resident Michael Williams (65) was arrested for a 2020 murder based largely on a ShotSpotter alert placing a 'gunshot' at an intersection. He spent nearly a year in jail — contracting COVID-19 twice — before Cook County prosecutors withdrew the ShotSpotter evidence and dismissed the case for lack of evidence. The MacArthur Justice Center litigated it as Williams v. City of Chicago; it became a leading example of an acoustic alert driving a wrongful arrest. Source: MacArthur Justice Center. Date: 2020–2022.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
A MacArthur Justice Center study of Chicago Police data (Jul 2019–Apr 2021) found 89% of ShotSpotter deployments turned up no gun crime and 86% led to no report of any crime — 40,000+ dead-end deployments, concentrated in Black and Latino neighborhoods; Chicago's Inspector General independently found the system rarely produced evidence of a gun crime. Chicago — long the flagship city — decommissioned ShotSpotter on Sept 22, 2024 after the mayor declined to renew, part of a wave that also included Dayton, Atlanta, San Antonio, Seattle and Buffalo. SoundThinking disputes the study's methodology and cites a 97% accuracy figure it has not substantiated in a peer-reviewed study. Source: MacArthur Justice Center / Chicago OIG / NPR. Date: 2021–2024.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Abuses
A BuzzFeed News review of a leaked Clearview client list found people at 2,228 agencies, companies and institutions had run nearly 500,000 face searches — including ICE (8,000+ searches from ~60 accounts) and the FBI (5,700+ across 20+ field offices), plus DOJ and CBP. Many ran through free trials individual officers activated with a government email, sometimes without their agency's knowledge or approval. ICE's largest reported purchase was a $3.75M Clearview contract. Source: BuzzFeed News (Ryan Mac et al.). Date: 2021.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
Runs the Atlas of Surveillance and Street-Level Surveillance projects; with 404 Media, broke much of the documented oversight record. Its core critique: the danger is 'the architecture itself' — a nationwide interconnected network — 'not just how individual agencies use the technology.'