alpr.watch
194 comments
·December 16, 2025fainpul
p_ing
I had thought about creating a larger roadside banner with the faces (pulled from voters guide) of the city council members who approved Flock, along with the face of the Sheriff with something along the lines of "These people want to know where your wife and daughter are at all times - deflock.me" and place it right next to the Flock camera.
Gotta tag some political organization on the banner which makes it illegal to remove.
rvloock
Belgian artist Dries Depoorter has something that comes close, where he tried to match public webcams against Instagram photos. See https://driesdepoorter.be/thefollower .
iris-digital
I'd like to start a standard marking of some sort to call them out. A hot pink arrow drawn with spray paint on the pole is the first thing that came to mind.
allenu
Not exactly the same, but Massive Attack had some facial recognition software running in the background during a concert to illustrate how pervasive modern day surveillance is: https://petapixel.com/2025/09/17/band-massive-attack-uses-li...
geoffeg
Could use projectors to display the feed directly onto the ground or a building wall, in some ways that may be more impactful. You'd have to stay with the projector and power source, but easier to move to the next location, and less of a chance of getting in trouble for defacing public property, etc.
jdthedisciple
What, are those streams publicly accessible?
I'm only aware of boring rooftop weather webcams where obv you can't see yourself.
Any examples for what you speak of?
fainpul
I don't mean these Flock cameras, I mean what you refer to as "boring rooftop weather webcams". Some of those show people fairly close up and even if you can't recognize your face in the stream, you will recognize the place and realize that it's you, standing there right now in that video stream.
Just search for "<your city> webcam" and see what you can find.
gs17
Some places have them available. For example, every highway camera in California (and in some places like Oakland there's plenty of cameras that show crosswalks): https://cwwp2.dot.ca.gov/vm/iframemap.htm
Quality isn't great, but you could likely see yourself recognizably.
peaseagee
Many are! I live in NY and 511ny.org has a great view of all traffic cams in the state (and some beyond it, but I don't understand how they got on the list...)
FelipeCortez
I remember seeing an art project in the UK ~10 years ago where they had actors enact a short film but everything was filmed using street cameras, which IIRC everyone could request access to with little bureaucracy.
staffordrj
"We have seen a flock of turkeys walk right along that fence on the outside, but I have also seen them jump high enough that they could easily land on the 4ft fence. Just 2 more feet of fence would stop all of this and give us the sense of security that we have every right to."
first the came for the turkeys...
ZeWaka
> We have had deer on our ring camera shown jumping over our fence into our backyard. This is very alarming.
travisgriggs
I keep wanting to see the "Rainbows End" style experiment.
The common reaction to surveillance seems to be similar to how we diet. We allow/validate a little bit of the negative agent, but try to limit it and then discuss endlessly how to keep the amount tamped down.
One aspect explored/hypothesized in Rainbows End, is what happens when surveillance becomes so ubiquitous that it's not a privilege of the "haves". I wonder if rather than "deflocking", the counter point is to surround every civic building with a raft of flock cameras that are in the public domain.
Just thinking the contrarian thoughts.
bitexploder
I started building ALPR and speed detection systems for my house based on RTSP feed. I kind of want to finish this with an outdoor TV that has a leaderboard of the drivers that drive the fastest and their license plate in public display on my property, but visible to the street. In part to make my neighbors aware of how powerful ALPR technology is now, but also many of my neighbors should slow the heck down. I am not sure how popular this would be, but also I kind of like starting the right kind of trouble :)
varenc
If you're in CA, I learned recently that any use of automatic license plate recognition here is regulated and has a bunch of rules. Technically is just turning on the feature in your consumer level camera with ALPR is illegal if you don't also do things like post a public notice.
The law is a bit old and seems like it was written under the assumption of that normal people wouldn't have access to ALPR tech for their homes. I suspect it gets very little enforcement.
kortex
Hilarious! If i didnt already have too many projects and hobbies, this is the kind of thing i'd do.
Maybe not a speed leaderboard, that just seems like a challenge to choon heads. But perhaps a "violation count". Also toss in a dB meter for loud exhaust (again dont make it a contest).
Edge compute with alpr/face/gait/whatever object detection at the camera is basically solved. Genie is out of the bottle. I think the most fruitful line of resistance is to regulate what can be done with that data once it leaves the device.
bitexploder
I am the loud exhaust. Where we live the noise pollution is not a concern and I have no complaints around that. Many of my neighbors have lifted trucks and go vroom cars. Ironically the performance cars are the nicest drivers :)
p_ing
There is a sign put up by the county on a downward hill with some nice curves in it. It _used_ to display your speed but that was removed in favor of just flashing "Slow Down" once people used it to see how fast they could navigate the bends.
jkestner
A friend of mine in school had a similar thought - make body cams so cheap that everyone has one. Watch the watchmen.
I’ve considered making this a commercial reality, but we’ve seen that ubiquitous cameras don’t necessarily stop cops or authoritarians from kneeling on your neck, if they don’t feel shame.
MangoToupe
I specifically have considered this in terms of protecting workers from (otherwise private or hidden) workplace abuse.
elevation
Two thoughts:
1. Amazon blink is an interesting hardware platform. With a power-optimized SoC, they achieve several years of intermittent 1080P video on a single AA battery. A similar approach and price point for body cam / dash cam would free users from having to constantly charge.
2. If you're designing cameras to protect human rights, you'll have to carefully consider the storage backend. Users must not lose access to a local copy of their own video because a central video service will be a choke point for censorship where critical evidence can disappear.
plandis
This only works if society was okay with surveillance on private property. The wealthy can afford large tracts of private land and can afford to send people on their behalf to interact in public for many things. They can pay services to come to them as well.
wombatpm
If the wealthy want to hide away in a prison of their own choice I’m ok with that. What I don’t like are the wealthy using their wealth to take over public spaces. Like using Venice for a private wedding.
kortex
It seems inevitable that cameras will proliferate, and edge compute will do more and more inference at the hardware level, turning heavy video data into lightweight tags that are easy to cross-correlate.
The last thing I want is only a few individuals having that data, whether it be governments, corporations, or billionaires and their meme-theme goon squads. Make it all accessible. Maybe if the public knows everyone (including their stalker/ex/rival) can track anyone, we'd be more hesitant to put all this tracking tech out there.
rootusrootus
Indeed, I already see this in the consumer space with Frigate users. Letting modern cameras handle the inference themselves makes running an NVR easier. Pretty soon all cameras will be this way, and as you say the output will be metadata that is easily collected and correlated. Sounds useful for my personal surveillance system and awful for society.
I feel like at some point we need to recognize the futility of solving this issue with technology. It is unstoppable. In the past we had the balls to regulate things like credit bureaus -- would we still do that today if given the choice?
We need to make blanket regulations that cover PII in all forms regardless of who is collecting it. Limits on how it can be used, transparency and control for citizens over their own PII, constitutional protections against the gov't doing an end run around the 4th amendment by using commercial data sources, etc.
buellerbueller
Surround the homes of the politicians and billionaires, and you're onto something. Better yet, make them publicly viewable webcams.
null
phildini
This is super important work, and is kind of why I built https://civic.band and https://civic.observer, which are generalized tools for monitoring civic govts. (You can search for anything, not just ALPR)
ZeWaka
Seem to be getting 405s from https://civic.observer/auth/login
And 404 from https://civic.band/why.html
phildini
Fixed the 404s on civic.band, thanks
Terr_
I sometimes imagine local laws/contracts with a provision like: "This system may not be operated if there is no state law that makes it a class X felony to violate someone's privacy in any of the Y conditions."
In other words, the "we're trustworthy we'd never do that" folks ought to be perfectly fine with harsh criminal penalties for misuse they're already promising would never happen.
This would also create an incentive for these companies to lobby for the creation/continuation of such a law at the state level, as a way to unlock (or retain) their ability to do businesses in the localities.
ChrisbyMe
Very cool, I was thinking about building a similar thing when I saw the Flock discourse, but got busy with the holidays.
Any interesting technical details? Getting the actual data from govt meetings looked like it was the hardest part to me.
toomuchtodo
Not OP, but I automate collecting public meeting data from various local agencies across the US. The below resources might be helpful. Public meeting video can be captured using yt-dlp (and if not made public, obtained with a FOIA request), archived, transcribed, etc. Sometimes there is an RSS feed, otherwise use an LLM provider as an extractor engine against the target datastore.
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
tptacek
A huge number of municipalities all share the same tech stack: Granicus/Legistar. You can pull the agendas and minutes of all their board meetings probably going back a decade. From captioning information you can Whisper-transcribe and attribute transcripts of the meetings themselves.
During our last election cycle, I did this for all our board meetings going back to the mid-aughts, using 'simonw's LLM tool to pass each agenda item to GPT 4o to classify them into topical buckets ("safety", "racial equity", "pensions", &c), tying them back to votes, and then doing a time breakdown of the topics (political opponents were claiming our board, which I support, was spending too much time on frivolous stuff).
That's a pretty silly use case, but also a data-intensive one; the things you'd actually want to do across municipalities are much simpler.
You could probably have Claude one-shot a municipal meetings notification service for you.
gearhart
Interesting. I just ran a similar search for « ANPR » which I think is the UK equivalent, in UK local government meetings and it’s mentioned about 80 times a month, which from a cursory glance looks like it’s more than are being shown here. I didn’t look through them yet to see how many were discussions about adding new installations vs referencing existing ones.
Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia, and if it is real, does anyone have a good idea of whether the same argument would apply in the UK?
deepvibrations
There are quite a few new camera types rolling out in the UK, summary:
4D AI speed/behaviour cameras (Redspeed Centio): multi-lane radar + high-res imaging; flags speeding, phone use, no seatbelt, and can check plates against DVLA/insurance databases.
AI “Heads-Up” camera units (Acusensus): elevated/overhead infrared cameras (often on trailers/vans) to spot phone use and seatbelt/non-restrained occupants.
New digital fixed cameras (Vector SR): slimmer, more discreet spot-speed cameras (sometimes with potential add-on behaviour detection, depending on setup).
Smart motorway gantry cameras (HADECS): enforce variable speed limits on motorways from gantries.
AI-assisted litter cameras: council enforcement for objects/litter thrown from vehicles
gearhart
Really interesting, thank you! They do seem very rare in comparison to ANPR, although maybe I'm not looking for the right thing. Durham, Plymouth and Wokingham are talking about Red Speed and Acusensus but given basically all 300 odd councils have discussed ANPR at some point in the last year, that's a tiny percentage.
rconti
There's been increased attention on it here when (from memory), it was found that police departments on the other side of the country were handing over data from completely different jurisdictions' cameras, without any kind of warrant or official order, to third parties.
pseudalopex
> Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible, or just paranoia
Our definitions of mass surveillance must differ for you to ask this. Flock cameras are marketed and purchases for mass surveillance expressly.
tptacek
That's true if you define modern policing as a form of mass surveillance, but doing so stretches the dilutes the usefulness of the term. People see a difference between automatically flagging cars on a stolen car hotlist, and monitoring the comings and goings of every resident in their town. And they're right to see that difference, and to roll their eyes at people who don't.
That doesn't mean the cameras are good; I think they aren't, or rather, at least in my metro, I know they aren't.
g_sch
These cameras may have been originally sold to municipalities as a way to find stolen cars, but from one year to the next, federal agencies have (1) decided that their main goal is finding arbitrary noncitizens to deport, and (2) that they're entitled to the ALPR data collected by municipalities in order to accomplish this goal. The technology isn't any different, but as a result of the way it was deployed (on Flock's centralized platform), it was trivial to flip a switch and turn it into a mass surveillance network.
lenerdenator
Mass deployment of CCTV and traffic cameras have a much, much longer history in the UK than in the US. Tires burning around Gatsos were a meme 20+ years ago.
verisimi
> Is the argument that Flock cameras are used for mass surveillance defensible
Its always defensible - think of the children!/terrorists! - and always in the same dystopian direction. Just believing yourself to be being tracked, changes behaviour. Just as in large cities, people moderate their behaviour.
lapetitejort
Reading these comments, a common through-line seems to be cars. Hit and runs, drive by shootings, cars without plates, cars speeding, breaking into cars, etc. But the concept of disincentivizing cars never seems to be brought up. Close down urban roads to private car traffic. Increase public transportation. Remove subsidies on gas. Build bike lanes.
Cars are weapons. They kill people quickly with momentum, and slowly with pollution and a sedentary lifestyle. We need to start treating them as such
Karrot_Kream
There's an asymmetry with cars and traffic calming. You can put a few thousand on putting in speed bumps (well, when you can; most municipalities put in obnoxious restrictions to "justify" a speed bump), road diets, buffered bike lanes, etc. But you only need one car to run a red light and hit a pedestrian crossing the street to kill them.
The rise in enthusiasm for ALPR is mostly a consequence of this asymmetry. Previously you'd have law enforcement go around patrolling to keep safety but the number of drivers in the US is growing faster than the number of LEOs and LEOs are expensive and controversial in certain areas.
I advocate for traffic calming all the time. But the asymmetry is real and, honestly, quite frustrating. A single distracted driver can cause you to panic brake on your bike and fall off and hurt yourself.
tptacek
I don't think it's a growth in drivers as much as it is a shift in policing away from traffic enforcement, something that's only gradually being unwound as people realize how much they hate lax traffic enforcement.
ronnier
I do everything I can to avoid public transportation. It's not worth the risk or the annoyances with aggressive and dangerous people. If I lived in Asia (which I did before), I'd love to use public transportation because the people are not aggressive, won't attack or kill me. That's not the case in the USA
lapetitejort
Most of the places within public transportation range are also within biking range, so I prefer biking. The end result is the same: one less car off the road.
Now if you say "What about all the crazy drivers??" think about this: have you ever considered that you might be the crazy driver? Maybe not 100% of the time, but maybe one day you're stressed so you speed up to get through a red light, or you really need to read this text because it's important. You only need to be a crazy driver for 30 seconds to end someone's life. Something that's almost impossible to do on public transportation or on a bike.
ronnier
Yeah I don’t bike for that reason. There’s no way I’ll ride a bike around cars and I can’t believe others put their life in the hands of people texting and driving.
p_ing
Sounds great -- if you're an urbanite and not the ~half of the population [in the US] who doesn't live anywhere near an urban center.
sofixa
It's actually only 20% that live in a rural (not within a metro area - urban or suburban): https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2022/urban-ru...
p_ing
Time to re-read what "urban" is defined as. My town, for instance, is counted as "urban", yet there is a single bus that will take you anywhere near to true urban center that comes twice per day. It's six miles (~15 minutes) from the nearest non-shit grocery store/Starbucks.
My town is "densely developed" (key phrase) residential with nearly no commerce to speak of. The largest employer is the school district, which isn't that big.
The nearest city with major employers is 45 minutes away outside of commute hours.
therobots927
They could also be easily tracked without cameras.
JuniperMesos
People bring up the concept of disincentivizing cars all the time. Many activists in local politics in urban areas have ideological problems with mass car use, and try to advocate for and enact anti-car, pro-public-transit policies.
The problem is, cars are extremely useful to most people in the US, public transit has very real inherent downsides, and local policies that disincentivize car use are very unpopular when actually implemented. Voting citizens get mad when the price of gas goes up and demand that their elected officials do something about it (also electrification of cars, which is proceeding apace, makes gasoline prices less important for ordinary people and also reduces some of the real negative externalities of cars).
I have used both urban public transit and cars regularly to get around, I'm personally familiar with the upsides and downsides of both, and while I definitely do want public transit infrastructure to be good, I frankly do not trust the motives of anti-car urbanist activists. I think they are willing to make the lives of most people on aggregate worse because they think private car ownership is in some sense immoral and so overweight the downsides of cars and underweight the downsides of public transit.
Also using drive-by shootings and car-break-ins as an anti-car argument is pretty disingenuous. This is a problem with criminals committing directly-violent crime or property crime against ordinary people, not with cars per se. Criminals absolutely commit crimes against people using public transit, and indeed one of the major problems with public transit is that it puts you in a closed space with random members of the public who might commit crimes against you (e.g. the Jordan_Neely incident, the random stabbing of Iryna_Zarutska, the less-widely-reported random crime incidents that happen regularly on urban public transit systems). One of the most important public policy measures that could be enacted to make public transit better is severe and consistent policing of public order crimes on transit - and of course more severe policing is also a potential solution to car drive-bys and break-ins.
deadfall23
In my area it's mostly Home Depot and Lowes parking lots. Time to start shopping online more. I'm looking at options for hiding my LP from AI cameras.
sodality2
It’s so awesome to see more people making things to fight back against ALPRs. Deflock movements are gaining traction across the country and genuinely making progress at suspension or cancellation of contracts.
therobots927
It’s because they tap into a primal fear that the Snowden revelations didn’t. It’s more obvious and visceral to know there’s a massive network of cameras watching everyone 24/7.
TheCraiggers
Not just that, but because people can see the devices themselves. It's not just some guy talking about bad things in Washington DC, you can see these things on rural roads in the middle of nowhere.
tptacek
Are they? Work I was involved in was instrumental in getting our Flock contract cancelled. Meanwhile, all the surrounding municipalities have, over the last 2 quarters, acquired more ALPR cameras.
I'm certain that had the 2024 election gone a different way, we'd still have our Flock cameras.
therobots927
How did you go about getting the contract canceled? I’m assuming you had to convince the police chief?
tptacek
No. The police chief was unhappy with the outcome.
I also didn't personally get the contract cancelled --- in fact, I (for complicated reasons) opposed cancelling the contract. But I can tell you the sequence of things that led to the cancellation:
1. OPPD made the mistake of trying to deploy the cameras as an ordinary appropriation, without direct oversight, which pissed the board off.
2. We deployed the cameras in a pilot program with a bunch of restrictions (use only for violent crimes, security controls, stuff like that) that included monthly transparency reports to our CPOC commission.
3. Over the pilot period, the results from the cameras weren't good. That wasn't directly the fault of the cameras (the problem is the Illinois LEADS database), but it allowed opponents of the cameras to tell a (true) story.
4. At the first renewal session, an effort was made to shut off the cameras entirely (I was in favor then!), but the police chief made an impassioned case for keeping them as investigative tools. We renewed the contract with two provisos: we essentially stopped responding to Flock alerts, and we cut off all out-of-state sharing.
5. Transparency reports about the cameras to CPOC continued to tell a dismal story about their utility, complicated now by the fact that we (reasonably) were not using them for alerting in the first place; we had something like 5 total stories over a year post renewal, and 4 of them were really flimsy. The cameras did not work.
6. Trump got elected.
7. A push to kill the cameras off once and for all came from the progressive faction of the board; Trump and the poor performance of the cameras made them impossible to defend.
8. OPPD turned off all sharing of camera data.
9. The board voted to cancel the contract anyways.
sodality2
It's definitely a push and pull; more are adopting it, but more are pushing back. The total amount is definitely still rising, though, but so is awareness.
There's Eugene and Springfield, OR; Cambridge, MA; a few in TX; Denver and Longmont, CO; Redmond, WA; Evanston and Oak Park, IL; etc.
tptacek
I'm Oak Park (I helped write our ALPR General Order and the transparency reporting requirements that formed the case for killing the contract because it wasn't addressing real crime).
Oak Park is 4.7 square miles. All our surrounding munis have rolled out more ALPRs after we killed ours.
Further: because of the oversight we had over our ALPRs before, they weren't really doing anything, for something like 2 years. OPPD kept them around because they were handy for post-incident investigation. We effectively had to stop responding to alerts once our police oversight commission ran the numbers of what the stops were.
Which is to say: our "de-Flocking" was mostly cosmetic. We'd already basically shut the cameras down and cut all sharing out.
qoez
We have this in sweden and it works fine. I kinda think the US would be better off with this since it'd lead to less crime or lower costs to investigate it
1123581321
Is that map using the same data as DeFlocked? The presentation is easier for me than how DeFlocked's map groups cameras until you zoom in closely.
For years I've thought about doing an "art project" to make people more aware of the fact they are being observed – but I never actually got up and did it.
The idea was to seek spots in the city where public web cams are pointed at, and paint QR codes on the ground at those spots (using a template), linking to the camera stream. So when curious passerbys scan the code, they see themselves in a camera stream and feel "watched".