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.'
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.