| ▲ | tptacek 12 hours ago |
| Besides the obvious privacy concern: at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete. But, give it a year or two, and you can replace this whole website with a black background and 72 point white bold text "YES". |
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| ▲ | diydsp 5 hours ago | parent | next [-] |
| Rule 1. Do not comply in advance. Do not accept it as inevitable. Do not give away your power without friction. |
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| ▲ | lcnPylGDnU4H9OF an hour ago | parent [-] | | tptacek writes on here sometimes about their activity in local politics. This perspective (from my reading) is that it has a lot of strong support that is difficult to oppose, not that we should give up. Read "give it a year or two" as "give it a year or two of things going as they are". |
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| ▲ | sp332 an hour ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| In New Hampshire, we banned both public and private ALPRs. You can see on the map that the only ones are at toll booths. Those got explicit exemptions in the law. |
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| ▲ | mycall 3 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| * While our most recent data is from 12/4/2025, there may be significant historical gaps. * Most agencies don't proactively publish audit logs
Records requests can take months or years to fulfill
Some agencies heavily redact their logs * We may not have requested logs from your local agencies yet |
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| ▲ | hopelite 9 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-] |
| There is already case law that makes the records collected by government through these methods no different than any other public records, especially since they are publicly visible license plate numbers. That has its own problems because it shields/deflects from the bigger issue of being treasonous, i.e., grotesque violation of the law of the Constitution, through mass surveillance that has also already been abused for various kinds of criminal acts by law enforcement. |
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| ▲ | calvinmorrison 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] |
| Flock is a private company, right. That's the whole schtick. Like, Flock can retain records indefinitely for example, they may sell those records to the government but they're a private party. |
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| ▲ | tptacek 12 hours ago | parent [-] | | What's your point? To the extent they're a private company you're even less likely to get access to records from Flock ALPR cameras. | | |
| ▲ | bigbuppo 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Just because the records created on behalf of the government are held by a private enterprise doesn't mean they aren't government records. | | |
| ▲ | tptacek 12 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | Right, I agree. My point is that the FOIA laws of many states forbid disclosing the data this web page purports to surface. | |
| ▲ | specialist 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | Yes but: Privatization is an effective way to negate the public's right know. eg Some companies have claimed trade secret protections to prevent public access. Infamously, election administration vendors like Diebold. I imagine anyone trying to investigate govt activities conducted by Palantir (for example) will run into similar stonewalling. Even getting the fulltext of contracts can be challenging. | | |
| ▲ | diydsp 4 hours ago | parent [-] | | Not automatically. There's aleeady case law(0x1) that ruled that images captured by Flock ALPR cameras are public records, even though the data are stored by Flock (a private vendor), not directly by the city. The court rejected the notion that “because the data sits on a private server, it’s not a public record.” Instead, it said that since the surveillance is paid for by the public (taxpayers) and used by a public agency, the data must comply with the state’s public-records law. This shows that — in at least one jurisdiction — using a private company to run ALPRs doesn’t shield the data from public-records requests. (0x1) https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2025/11/washington-court-rules... |
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| ▲ | calvinmorrison 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | > at the very least in my state (Illinois), it's not lawful for public bodies to disclose the license plate numbers read from ALPR cameras, so this data set is necessarily incomplete. They're not a public body, that was my point | | |
| ▲ | hopelite 9 hours ago | parent [-] | | They de facto are because they only place cameras in public places and on public land by contract with the government in one form or another; be it with a treasonous sheriff or a treasonous state executive and legislature. The public would not be talking about Flock if they had not worked to create a treasonous surveillance state and instead only did things like monitored truck movements in a logistics depot. The private contracts for things like HOA neighborhoods and corporations, e.g., big box store loss prevention and customer data tracking, but those’s are a totally different issue that have nothing to do with the use of public funds and power for mass surveillance. | | |
| ▲ | RHSeeger 9 hours ago | parent | next [-] | | This feels a lot like "Yeah, but we'll do it anyways until a court makes us stop; because the profit is more than the fine" | |
| ▲ | immibis 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-] | | but thry're not literally the government and the relevant laws only affect the literal government. | | |
| ▲ | svnt 3 hours ago | parent [-] | | No, there is legal precedent that private companies who perform government services are subject to the same laws. | | |
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