Also: https://dave.autonoma.ca/blog/2019/06/06/web-of-knowledge/
Worth looking at how these cameras got approved in the first place. My county's ALPR interlocal passed on the consent agenda in December 2024, one block vote alongside forty other items, no discussion, and went through consent again in April 2025. Nothing was "hidden", it's just that "public" here means a 300 page agenda packet and a four hour YouTube video with no transcript, completely unreadable in practice.
So I spent a week and a half building a pipeline over what the county already publishes. It pulls the CivicPlus portal (agendas, minutes, item metadata, outcomes) and the YouTube channel, does ASR plus diarization, then aligns the transcript against the published agenda so the passage carries the item it happened under and whatever outcome the minutes recorded for it. Search is hybrid lexical and semantic, and the video is synced to the transcript so any claim can be checked against the recording.
The speaker attribution and the alignment was the hard part. Roughly two thirds of passages have no reliable name attached, and diarization gives you clusters rather than identities, so I mark confidence and basis rather than guessing a name. Alignment is very messy because the published agenda order and the order things actually get taken up diverge constantly, and the recorded outcome is often just "Approved the Consent Agenda" for an item that never got discussed. There is a labeling admin area to improve the dataset after initial collection
At my county meeting on Aug 25th (in a few days) I'm bringing up the fiscal side. Ours was approved under an item title that said no funding was required. No accounting has been done of what enforcement costs when someone takes a camera down. Prosecutor and court hours. Jail time, or just holding, if the state charges it. Lost future wages from otherwise upstanding citizens who now have a felony. None of that was in front of the commissioners when they approved it, and none of it is in front of them now.
Most counties run the same portal software and post to YouTube, so this should generalize. Code is at https://github.com/Tostino/civic-watch and the Pasco instance is at https://pasco.watch if anyone wants to point one at their own county. Happy to help if anyone wants.
"I built a tool to help you understand how/if your community has agreed to deploy Flock cameras. You can try it out here: [ ].
The hardest part of this was..."
In small towns, people distrust the federal government and big tech a lot more.
I really distrust flock in and of itself.
So no, actually Flock itself is the problem. If Flock were willing to sign some consent decree that its data can only be accessed by police with a valid judicial warrant, for example, they probably could've headed off this entire mess.
But instead they called people "terroristic" for pushing back. Completely braindead move from the CEO.
The fundamental issue is that Flock doesn't care about people's privacy or rights. That washes out in a variety of ways including CEOs' statements, product-level security controls (thus creating the horror stories), and lack of legal commitments to protections.
I would personally be in favor of a fairly widespread camera network that had significant legal protections built in. Flock has demonstrated – in every possible way – they cannot possibly be the providers of such a system.
Wanna look up where a murderer drove? Go get a warrant
Wanna look up where a robbery suspect drove to? Go get a Warrant.
Divorce case hinging on one party's whereabouts on a certain date? Warrant.
Speeding tickets are automatically filed anyways.
[1]: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2026/08/too-little-too-late-fl...
There is no reason or justification for us to live in a surveillance state, "protecting" the data with a warrant doesn't cut it.
Cutting down and destroying mass surveillance equipment is a patriotic action and should be applauded.
So I get it, we're in the middle of a populist uprising against it, and it's nice to ride that wave of support. But behind the scenes, these two factors are driving adoption, and we'll keep coming back to it when the backlash eventually fizzles.
I say we should just use this backlash to put in the protections EFF suggests or fix the two underlying causes. Those are the options.
[1]: https://www.oaklandca.gov/Public-Safety-Streets/Traffic-Safe...
[2]: https://stateline.org/2025/11/24/why-clearance-rates-dont-te...
With flock, citizens are concerned by the privacy implications of the state keeping a dossier of each citizen’s movements.
But once we assure citizens the flock cameras have already issued 500,000 speeding fines in a single town this year, no doubt they’ll come to support the cameras.
Perhaps the cameras could also automatically issue parking fines, to garner even more popular support!
…oops [1]
[1]: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/03/18/headway/motor-vehicles-fa...
https://www.thedrive.com/news/how-flock-cameras-wrongly-trac...
https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/10/flock-safety-and-texas...
Strong disagree. Life in public areas is often still part of private life. And we should treat it with the respect and privacy that it deserves. You going to the doctor? That's part of your private life. You meeting with an old friend to catch up? Also private, even though you do it in a public cafe.
The problem is that these systems, always and without fail, come with government and police overreach and then the "guilty unless proven innocent" paradigm creeps in, which we have already seen happen with flock. You have police using the technology to spy on their lovers and friends of their wives and husbands, and you have political campaigns finding ways to spy on their opponents, and activists getting special attention from prosecutors, etc. Which always happs, but with totalitarianism is an absolute train wreck for an open, fair, and power-balanced government.
But not only do you have to trust the government now (and you likely should not), you also need to trust the government far into the future (which you absolutely cannot do) because the tools will still exist.
Don't accept tools that are also strong weapons for oppression.