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.'
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
Runs a national campaign; its foundational 2013 report 'You Are Being Tracked' first called ALPRs mass location tracking. Notes fewer than 1% of scanned cars are tied to any crime, and documented the 'perpetual, worldwide' data-sharing license in Flock's contracts.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
A grassroots project founded in 2024 by software engineer Will Freeman (after noticing camera clusters around Huntsville, Alabama) that crowdsources ALPR camera locations into OpenStreetMap — the dataset behind the map on this page. When Flock sent a trademark cease-and-desist in Feb 2025, EFF represented Freeman and refused it.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
Litigates ALPR dragnets as Fourth Amendment violations (Norfolk; San Jose) and compiles the running tallies of wrongful stops and officer stalking.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
Founded 2019 by Albert Fox Cahn; argues federal intelligence-sharing has let ICE 'sidestep sanctuary laws and co-opt local police databases and surveillance tools, including license plate readers.'
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
Opened Congressional investigations and urged the FTC to act. Sen. Wyden: 'I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable.'
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Opposition
A public-interest law firm (Northwestern Pritzker School of Law) that produced the leading empirical study of ShotSpotter in Chicago (89% of deployments found no gun crime) and litigates acoustic-surveillance harms, including Williams v. City of Chicago on behalf of a man wrongly jailed on a gunshot alert.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
Institute for Justice Fourth Amendment challenge to Norfolk's 176-camera Flock dragnet (one plaintiff's car captured 475 times in ~4.5 months). ACLU, EFF, EPIC, Cato and NCLA filed amici for the plaintiffs; the DOJ filed for Norfolk. Status: unverified.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
Institute for Justice federal class action challenging San Jose's 474 Flock cameras (which recorded ~360M images in 2024; ~0.25% matched a hotlist) as a warrantless Fourth Amendment search. Status: unverified.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
EFF + ACLU of Northern California suit under the California Constitution, alleging 261,711 warrantless database searches in one year (~692/day).
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
Class action against Flock itself under California's ALPR Privacy Act (SB 34), seeking statutory damages of at least $2,500 per violation; alleges out-of-state agencies searched SFPD's Flock data over 1.6M times in seven months.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
A geofence-warrant case (not ALPR), but the Court held such a search implicates the Fourth Amendment and rejected the government's 'small slice of a big database' argument — reasoning that undercuts the Norfolk district-court rationale and strengthens Schmidt's appeal.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
ACLU suit under Illinois' Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The 2022 settlement permanently bars Clearview, nationwide, from selling or giving its faceprint database to most private entities, bars access to any Illinois state/local government body (including police) for five years, and requires an opt-out for Illinois residents. A separate $51.75M federal class-action settlement giving class members a ~23% equity stake in Clearview was approved in 2025.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
The Fourth Circuit, en banc, ruled Baltimore's 'Aerial Investigation Research' program — run by private contractor Persistent Surveillance Systems, whose camera planes captured ~12 hours/day of movement across ~90% of the city — an unconstitutional warrantless search under Carpenter v. U.S., likening it to putting 'an ankle monitor on every person in the city.' A settlement bars Baltimore from running a similar program.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr Lawsuits
The first U.S. appellate ruling that using a cell-site simulator is a Fourth Amendment search ordinarily requiring a warrant. Baltimore Police used a 'Hailstorm' device without a warrant to force Andrews's phone to reveal its location inside a private home; the courts upheld suppression of the resulting evidence.
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr City Actions
Let its Flock pilot lapse June 30, 2025 over ICE/data-sharing risk (an audit had found 20%+ of searches with no case number).
Smart Cities & Surveillance — WEF, Contracts, FOIA
· Alpr Flock
/ Alpr City Actions
Unanimously terminated Sept 9, 2025 (11 cameras removed) after Flock admitted CBP access days after saying there was none.