Flock Safety doesn’t seem to care about anyone. Not its customers, not those captured by its cameras, not even the legislators trying to find a balance between safety and privacy.
Flock started out by pitching its cameras — with built-in license plate readers — to the kind of people with money to blow on unproven tech and the willingness to use it to keep unwanted people (read: not white) out of their neighborhoods. It soon expanded past the gated community market, courting cops who wanted to use the tech to track unwanted people (read: not white) who might be driving around in cars and existing.
As always, both parties (Flock/cops) claimed the tech was essential to capturing the “worst of the worst” — auto thieves, wanted felons, sex offenders, etc. And, as always, real-world use cases were more along the lines of oh, you know, tracking down women seeking abortion options or letting cops keep tabs on their ex-wives.
The problem with Flock isn’t necessarily unique to Flock. It’s a problem almost every third-party contractor creates. When thing go poorly (and they have gone very poorly for Flock recently), no one seems to know who’s responsible for removing the unwanted tech, much less who actually has the authority to shut a surveillance system down.
This has created a problem that has no immediate solution. When Dayton, Ohio shut down its Flock cameras, it had no idea whether contract termination meant the cameras were actually shut off. Worse, law enforcement officials didn’t seem to know either. A fix was needed, and Dayton found a cost-effective way of keeping Flock from operating the unwanted cameras until when (or if!) it decided to roll into town to remove them.
The city of Dayton, Ohio has covered its Flock automated license plate reader cameras with black trash bags in part because police there are unsure whether the cameras are still active and the city also doesn’t seem to know whether it is allowed to take the cameras down. The move comes after months of resident outrage, a scandal in which the city was sharing Flock camera data for immigration enforcement apparently on accident, and a $30,000 audit into how the cameras are being used.
You can see the problem. While the city may have terminated the contract and the PD stating it won’t use the cameras, there’s no real “OFF” switch on the end user side. Because the cameras aren’t truly owned by the city, it has to wait around for Flock to come get its boys. And even though the Dayton PD’s access portal may be dead because it’s parted ways with Flock, that doesn’t mean hundreds of law enforcement agencies around the US don’t have access to the cameras the city has determined can’t be used.
This isn’t speculation. This is something that has already been observed by other municipalities.
Cities are not sure what their contracts state how to extricate themselves from those contracts, or whether the cameras are recording (and where that data is going). This uncertainty highlights the problems associated with using private, third-party surveillance infrastructure. Last week, for example, the mayor of Menominee, Wisconsin said that Flock cameras in the city “have been activated without city council approval.”
That’s some shady shit right there. But it’s not even the shadiest thing Flock has done in terms of (1) supposedly deactivated cameras and (2) garbage bag-covered cameras. Late last year, the city of Evanston, Illinois covered Flock cameras in garbage bags until Flock came to remove them. Then this happened:
The city previously ordered Flock to shut down 19 cameras (18 stationary and one flex camera that can be attached to a squad car) provided by the company and put its contract with Flock on a 30-day termination notice on Aug. 26. The company took down 15 of the 18 stationary cameras by Sept. 8, only to reinstall all of them by Tuesday. This was apparently without authorization from city officials, who sent Flock a cease-and-desist order to take them back down.
What the actual fuck? And yeah, one might be inclined to chalk this up to a simple misunderstanding, but only if one isn’t familiar with Flock’s general disregard for municipal laws:
Company communications with state transportation agencies obtained via public records requests, and interviews with more than half a dozen former employees, suggest that in its rush to install surveillance cameras in the absence of clear regulatory frameworks, Flock repeatedly broke the law in at least five states.
In South Carolina, State Transportation Secretary Christy Hall told Forbes that since spring 2022, her staff has found more than 200 unpermitted Flock cameras during routine monitoring of public roads.
Hence the garbage bags. It appears Flock is willing to activate cameras it’s been instructed to deactivate. And that’s when it’s not installing cameras illegally or thumbing its nose at removal orders by reinstalling cameras it has just removed.
Private companies who pull this sort of shit would be shut down, if not banned, by cities if it involved anything other than cop tech. Somehow, Flock manages to ride this out by claiming to be a cop’s best friend, even as its pretending local laws and regulations don’t apply to it.
I would encourage cities looking to rid themselves of Flock cameras to go one step further: just pry them off the poles and toss them in the nearest dumpster. If Flock wants to retrieve its equipment, it can be directed to the nearest landfill. Or, if cities don’t feel comfortable doing this themselves, they can always host a few foreign exchange students to help ensure Flock cameras remain inoperable until removal.
The Trump administration is loosening restrictions on the sharing of law enforcement information with the CIA and other intelligence agencies, officials said, overriding controls that have been in place for decades to protect the privacy of U.S. citizens.
Government officials said the changes could give the intelligence agencies access to a database containing hundreds of millions of documents — from FBI case files and banking records to criminal investigations of labor unions — that touch on the activities of law-abiding Americans.
Administration officials said they are providing the intelligence agencies with more information from investigations by the FBI, Drug Enforcement Administration and other agencies to combat drug gangs and other transnational criminal groups that the administration has classified as terrorists.
But they have taken these steps with almost no public acknowledgement or notification to Congress. Inside the government, officials said, the process has been marked by a similar lack of transparency, with scant high-level discussion and little debate among government lawyers.
“None of this has been thought through very carefully — which is shocking,” one intelligence official said of the moves to expand information sharing. “There are a lot of privacy concerns out there, and nobody really wants to deal with them.”
A spokesperson for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, Olivia Coleman, declined to answer specific questions about the expanded information sharing or the legal basis for it.
Instead, she cited some recent public statements by senior administration officials, including one in which the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard, emphasized the importance of “making sure that we have seamless two-way push communications with our law enforcement partners to facilitate that bi-directional sharing of information.”
In the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, revelations that Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon had used the CIA to spy on American anti-war and civil rights activists outraged Americans who feared the specter of a secret police. The congressional reforms that followed reinforced the long-standing ban on intelligence agencies gathering information about the domestic activities of U.S. citizens.
Compared with the FBI and other federal law enforcement organizations, the intelligence agencies operate with far greater secrecy and less scrutiny from Congress and the courts. They are generally allowed to collect information on Americans only as part of foreign intelligence investigations. Exemptions must be approved by the U.S. attorney general and the director of national intelligence. The National Security Agency, for example, can intercept communications between people inside the United States and terror suspects abroad without the probable cause or judicial warrants that are generally required of law enforcement agencies.
Since the terror attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the expansion of that surveillance authority in the fight against Islamist terrorism has been the subject of often intense debates among the three branches of government.
Word of the Trump administration’s efforts to expand the sharing of law enforcement information with the intelligence agencies was met with alarm by advocates for civil liberties protections.
“The Intelligence Community operates with broad authorities, constant secrecy and little-to-no judicial oversight because it is meant to focus on foreign threats,” Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, a senior Democrat on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement to ProPublica.
Giving the intelligence agencies wider access to information on the activities of U.S. citizens not suspected of any crime “puts Americans’ freedoms at risk,” the senator added. “The potential for abuse of that information is staggering.”
Most of the current and former officials interviewed for this story would speak only on condition of anonymity because of the secrecy of the matter and because they feared retaliation for criticizing the administration’s approach.
Virtually all those officials said they supported the goal of sharing law enforcement information more effectively, so long as sensitive investigations and citizens’ privacy were protected. But after years in which Republican and Democratic administrations weighed those considerations deliberately — and made little headway with proposed reforms — officials said the Trump administration has pushed ahead with little regard for those concerns.
“There will always be those who simply want to turn on a spigot and comingle all available information, but you can’t just flip a switch — at least not if you want the government to uphold the rule of law,” said Russell Travers, a former acting director of the National Counterterrorism Center who served in senior intelligence roles under both Republican and Democratic administrations.
The 9/11 attacks — which exposed the CIA’s failure to share intelligence with the FBI even as Al Qaida moved its operatives into the United States — led to a series of reforms intended to transform how the government managed terrorism information.
A centerpiece of that effort was the establishment of the NCTC, as the counterterrorism center is known, to collect and analyze intelligence on foreign terrorist groups. The statutes that established the NCTC explicitly prohibit it from collecting information on domestic terror threats.
National security officials have spent much less time trying to remedy what they have acknowledged are serious deficiencies in the government’s management of intelligence on organized crime groups.
In 2011, President Barack Obama noted those problems in issuing a new national strategy to “build, balance and integrate the tools of American power to combat transnational organized crime.” Although the Obama plan stressed the need for improved information-sharing, it led to only minimal changes.
President Donald Trump has seized on the issue with greater urgency. He has also declared his intention to improve information-sharing across the government, signing an executive order to eliminate “information silos” of unclassified information.
More consequentially, he went on to brand more than a dozen Latin American drug mafias and criminal gangs as terrorist organizations.
The administration has used those designations to justify more extreme measures against the criminal groups. Since last year, it has killed at least 148 suspected drug smugglers with missile strikes in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, steps that many legal experts have denounced as violations of international law.
Some administration officials have argued that the terror designations entitle intelligence agencies to access all law enforcement case files related to the Sinaloa Cartel, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and other gangs designated by the State Department as foreign terrorist organizations.
The first criterion for those designations is that a group must “be a foreign organization.” Yet unlike Islamist terror groups such as al-Qaida or al-Shabab, Latin drug mafias and criminal gangs like MS-13 have a large and complex presence inside the United States. Their members are much more likely to be U.S. citizens and to live and operate here.
Those steps were seen by some intelligence experts as potentially opening the door for the CIA and other agencies to monitor Americans who support antifa in violation of their free speech rights. The approach also echoed justifications that both Johnson and Nixon used for domestic spying by the CIA: that such investigations were needed to determine whether government critics were being supported by foreign governments.
The wider sharing of law enforcement case files is also being driven by the administration’s abrupt decision to disband the Justice Department office that for decades coordinated the work of different agencies on major drug trafficking and organized crime cases. That office, the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, was abruptly shut down on Sept. 30 as the Trump administration was setting up a new network of Homeland Security Task Forces designed by the White House homeland security adviser, Stephen Miller.
The new task forces, which were first described in detail by ProPublica last year, are designed to refocus federal law enforcement agencies on what Miller and other officials have portrayed as an alarming nexus of immigration and transnational crime. The reorganization also gives the White House and the Department of Homeland Security new authority to oversee transnational crime investigations, subordinating the DEA and federal prosecutors, who were central to the previous system.
That reorganization has set off a struggle over the control of OCDETF’s crown jewel, a database of some 770 million records that is the only central, searchable repository of drug trafficking and organized crime case files in the federal government.
Until now, the records of that database, which is called Compass, have only been accessible to investigators under elaborate rules agreed to by the more than 20 agencies that shared their information. The system was widely viewed as cumbersome, but officials said it also encouraged cooperation among the agencies while protecting sensitive case files and U.S. citizens’ privacy.
Although the Homeland Security Task Forces took possession of the Compass system when their leadership moved into OCDETF’s headquarters in suburban Virginia, the administration is still deciding how it will operate that database, officials said.
However, officials said, intelligence agencies and the Defense Department have already taken a series of technical steps to connect their networks to Compass so they can access its information if they are permitted to do so.
The White House press office did not respond to questions about how the government will manage the Compass database and whether it will remain under the control of the Homeland Security Task Forces.
The National Counterterrorism Center, under its new director, Joe Kent, has been notably forceful in seeking to manage the Compass system, several officials said. Kent, a former Army Special Forces and CIA paramilitary officer who twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in Washington state, was previously a top aide to the national intelligence director, Tulsi Gabbard.
The FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies have strongly opposed the NCTC effort, the officials said. In internal discussions, they added, the law enforcement agencies have argued that it makes no sense for an intelligence agency to manage sensitive information that comes almost entirely from law enforcement.
“The NCTC has taken a very aggressive stance,” one official said. “They think the agencies should be sharing everything with them, and it should be up to them to decide what is relevant and what U.S. citizen information they shouldn’t keep.”
The FBI declined to comment in response to questions from ProPublica. A DEA spokesperson also would not discuss the agency’s actions or views on the wider sharing of its information with the intelligence community. But in a statement the spokesman added, “DEA is committed to working with our IC and law enforcement partners to ensure reliable information-sharing and strong coordination to most effectively target the designated cartels.”
Even with the Trump administration’s expanded definition of what might constitute terrorist activity, the information on terror groups accounts for only a small fraction of the records in the Compass system, current and former officials said.
The records include State Department visa records, some files of U.S. Postal Service inspectors, years of suspicious transaction reports from the Treasury Department and call records from the Bureau of Prisons.
Investigative files of the FBI, DEA and other law enforcement agencies often include information about witnesses, associates of suspects and others who have never committed any crimes, officials said.
“You have witness information, target information, bank account information,” the former OCDETF director, Thomas Padden, said in an interview. “I can’t think of a dataset that would not be a concern if it were shared without some controls. You need checks and balances, and it’s not clear to me that those are in place.”
Officials familiar with the interagency discussions said NCTC and other intelligence officials have insisted they are interested only in terror-related information and that they have electronic systems that can appropriately filter out information on U.S. persons.
But FBI and other law enforcement agencies have challenged those arguments, officials said, contending that the NCTC proposal would almost inevitably breach privacy laws and imperil sensitive case information without necessarily strengthening the fight against transnational criminals.
Already, NCTC officials have been pressing the FBI and DEA to share all the information they have on the criminal groups that have been designated as terrorist organizations, officials said.
The DEA, which had previously earned a reputation for jealously guarding its case files, authorized the transfer of at least some of those files, officials said, adding to pressure on the FBI to do the same.
Administration lawyers have argued that such information sharing is authorized by the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004, the law that reorganized intelligence activities after 9/11. Officials have also cited the 2001 Patriot Act, which gives law enforcement agencies power to obtain financial, communications and other information on a subject they certify as having ties to terrorism.
The central role of the NCTC in collecting and analyzing terrorism information specifically excludes “intelligence pertaining exclusively to domestic terrorists and domestic counterterrorism.” But that has not stopped Kent or his boss, intelligence director Gabbard, from stepping over red lines that their predecessors carefully avoided.
In October, Kent drew sharp criticism from the FBI after he examined files from the bureau’s ongoing investigation of the assassination of Charlie Kirk, the right-wing activist. That episode was first reported by The New York Times.
Last month, Gabbard appeared to lead a raid at which the FBI seized truckloads of 2020 presidential voting records from an election center in Fulton County, Georgia. Officials later said she was sent by Trump but did not oversee the operation.
In years past, officials said, the possibility of crossing long-settled legal boundaries on citizens’ privacy would have precipitated a flurry of high-level meetings, legal opinions and policy memos. But almost none of that internal discussion has taken place, they said.
“We had lengthy interagency meetings that involved lawyers, civil liberties, privacy and operational security types to ensure that we were being good stewards of information and not trampling all over U.S. persons’ privacy rights,” said Travers, the former NCTC director.
When administration officials abruptly moved to close down OCDETF and supplant it with the Homeland Security Task Forces network, they seemed to have little grasp of the complexities of such a transition, several people involved in the process said.
The agencies that contributed records to OCDETF were ordered to sign over their information to the task forces, but they did so without knowing if the system’s new custodians would observe the conditions under which the files were shared.
Nor were they encouraged to ask, officials said.
While both the FBI and DEA have objected to a change in the protocols, officials said smaller agencies that contributed some of their records to the OCDETF system have been “reluctant to push back too hard,” as one of them put it.
The NCTC, which faced budget cuts during the Biden administration, has been among those most eager to service the new Homeland Security Task Forces. To that end, it set up a new fusion center to promote “two-way intelligence sharing of actionable information between the intelligence community and law enforcement,” as Gabbard described it.
The expanded sharing of law enforcement and intelligence information on trafficking groups is also a key goal of the Pentagon’s new Tucson, Arizona-based Joint Interagency Task Force-Counter Cartel. In announcing the task force’s creation last month, the U.S. Northern Command said it would work with the Homeland Security Task Forces “to ensure we are sharing all intelligence between our Department of War, law enforcement and Intelligence Community partners.”
In the last months of the Biden administration, a somewhat similar proposal was put forward by the then-DEA administrator, Anne Milgram. That plan involved setting up a pair of centers where DEA, CIA and other agencies would pool information on major Mexican drug trafficking groups.
At the time, one particularly strong objection came from the Defense Department’s counternarcotics and stabilization office, officials said. The sharing of such law enforcement information with the intelligence community, an official there noted, could violate laws prohibiting the CIA from gathering intelligence on Americans inside the United States.
The Pentagon, he warned, would want no part of such a plan.
According to AdWeek, the price for a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl LX has soared to $8 million, after NBC opened in the summer by offering spots for $7 million. As AdWeek notes, “due to demand, the company has already reached its cap for the number of spots that were available for advertisers to buy during the upfront season.”
$8 million for 30 seconds sometimes means turning a niche product into a national phenomena. The 30 seconds purchased by Ring went the other way. If you want to see how $8 million can be used to promote mass surveillance enabled by consumer products, here you go:
Sure, it looks pretty innocuous. And what could be better than turning Ring and Flock Safety’s network of cameras into a digital proxy for posting “LOST DOG” signs all over the neighborhood? Well, as it turns out, pretty much everyone saw how problematic this offering was, especially considering what’s already known about Ring, Flock Safety, and both companies’ rather cavalier attitude towards privacy and other aspects of the Fourth Amendment.
To begin with, the “Search Party” feature that allows people to access recordings and images captured by other people’s cameras is already on, which likely comes as a surprise to owners of these devices. Here’s what The Verge’s Jennifer Tuohy discovered last October, shortly after Ring announced its partnership with Flock Safety — a company best known for allowing cops to hunt down people seeking abortions and/or allowing federal officers to perform nationwide searches for whoever they might be looking for (which, of course, would be anyone looking kinda like an immigrant).
[I]t turns out that Search Party is enabled by default. In an email to customers this week, Siminoff wrote that the feature is rolling out to Ring outdoor cameras in November and noted, “You can always turn off Search Party.”
I checked my cameras this morning, and they were all automatically set to enable Search Party. And I’m not alone; Ring users on Reddit have also reported that their cameras have been enabled for Search Party.
This under-reported “feature” was exposed by Ring’s Super Bowl ad, which resulted in enough backlash that Flock Safety no longer has a Ring to wear. Back to Jennifer Tuohy and The Verge:
In a statement published on Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
While that last sentence may be true, it appears sharing was on by default when it came to Ring’s own cameras. That Flock Safety never got a chance to participate is good to know, but “Search Party” has apparently been active since its implementation last year, even if it was limited to Ring devices.
And while Ring claims the Search Party feature can’t be used to search for “human biometrics,” that’s hardly comforting when it appears Ring definitely wants to add more of this kind of thing to its existing cameras.
On top of this, the company recently launched a new facial recognition feature, Familiar Faces. Combined with Search Party, the technological leap to using neighborhood cameras to search for people through a mass-surveillance network suddenly seems very small.
Ring insists this is not another mass surveillance tool, but rather something that attempts to recognize who’s at any user’s door when sending alerts, in order to differentiate friends and family members from strangers who might be within camera range. Again, there’s some utility to this offering, but the tech lends itself to surveillance abuses, especially when law enforcement may only be a subpoena away from accessing images and recordings captured by privately-owned devices.
Finally, the statement given by Ring only states that this won’t be happening right now, which is a wise choice considering its unpopularity at the moment. But that doesn’t mean Ring and Flock won’t seek to consummate this marriage of surveillance tech, albeit in a more private fashion that doesn’t involve alarming hundreds of millions of sports viewers simultaneously.
Surveillance technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy private donors have long helped provide local law enforcement “free” access to surveillance equipment that bypasses local oversight. The result is predictable: serious accountability gaps and data pipelines to other entities, including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), that expose millions of people to harm.
The collection and sharing of our data quietly generates detailed records of people’s movements and associations that can be exposed, hacked, or repurposed without their knowledge or consent. Those records weaken sanctuary and First Amendment protections while facilitating the targeting of vulnerable people.
Cities can and should use their power to reject federal grants, vendor trials, donations from wealthy individuals, or participation in partnerships that facilitate surveillance and experimentation with spy tech.
If these projects are greenlit, oversight is imperative. Mechanisms like public hearings, competitive bidding, public records transparency, and city council supervision aid to ensure these acquisitions include basic safeguards — like use policies, audits, and consequences for misuse — to protect the public from abuse and from creeping contracts that grow into whole suites of products.
Clear policies and oversight mechanisms must be in place before using any surveillance tools, free or not, and communities and their elected officials must be at the center of every decision about whether to bring these tools in at all.
Here are some of the most common methods “free” surveillance tech makes its way into communities.
Trials and Pilots
Police departments are regularly offered free access to surveillance tools and software through trials and pilot programs that often aren’t accompanied by appropriate use policies. In many jurisdictions, trials do not trigger the same requirements to go before decision-makers outside the police department. This means the public may have no idea that a pilot program for surveillance technology is happening in their city.
In Denver, Colorado, the police department is running trials of possible unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) for a drone-as-first-responder (DFR) program from two competing drone vendors: Flock Safety Aerodome drones (through August 2026) and drones from the company Skydio, partnering with Axon, the multi-billion dollar police technology company behind tools like Tasers and AI-generated police reports. Drones create unique issues given their vantage for capturing private property and unsuspecting civilians, as well as their capacity to make other technologies, like ALPRs, airborne.
Functional, Even Without Funding
We’ve seen cities decide not to fund a tool, or run out of funding for it, only to have a company continue providing it in the hope that money will turn up. This happened in Fall River, Massachusetts, where the police department decided not to fund ShotSpotter’s $90,000 annual cost and its frequent false alarms, but continued using the system when the company provided free access.
Importantly, police technology companies are developing more features and subscription-based models, so what’s “free” today frequently results in taxpayers footing the bill later.
Gifts from Police Foundations and Wealthy Donors
Police foundations and the wealthy have pushed surveillance-driven agendas in their local communities by donating equipment and making large monetary gifts, another means of acquiring these tools without public oversight or buy-in.
In Atlanta, the Atlanta Police Foundation (APF) attempted to use its position as a private entity to circumvent transparency. Following a court challenge from the Atlanta Community Press Collective and Lucy Parsons Labs, a Georgia court determined that the APF must comply with public records laws related to some of its actions and purchases on behalf of law enforcement. In San Francisco, billionaire Chris Larsen has financially supported a supercharging of the city’s surveillance infrastructure, donating $9.4 million to fund the San Francisco Police Department’s (SFPD) Real-Time Investigation Center, where a menu of surveillance technologies and data come together to surveil the city’s residents. This move comes after the billionaire backed a ballot measure, which passed in March 2025, eroding the city’s surveillance technology law and allowing the SFPD free rein to use new surveillance technologies for a full year without oversight.
Free Tech for Federal Data Pipelines
Federal grants and Department of Homeland Security funding are another way surveillance technology appears free to, only to lock municipalities into long‑term data‑sharing and recurring costs.
Through the Homeland Security Grant Program, which includes the State Homeland Security Program (SHSP) and the Urban Areas Security (UASI) Initiative, and Department of Justice programs like Byrne JAG, the federal government reimburses states and cities for “homeland security” equipment and software, including including law‑enforcement surveillance tools, analytics platforms, and real‑time crime centers. Grant guidance and vendor marketing materials make clear that these funds can be used for automated license plate readers, integrated video surveillance and analytics systems, and centralized command‑center software—in other words, purchases framed as counterterrorism investments but deployed in everyday policing.
Vendors have learned to design products around this federal money, pitching ALPR networks, camera systems, and analytic platforms as “grant-ready” solutions that can be acquired with little or no upfront local cost. Motorola Solutions, for example, advertises how SHSP and UASI dollars can be used for “law enforcement surveillance equipment” and “video surveillance, warning, and access control” systems. Flock Safety, partnering with Lexipol, a company that writes use policies for law enforcement, offers a “License Plate Readers Grant Assistance Program” that helps police departments identify federal and state grants and tailor their applications to fund ALPR projects.
Grant assistance programs let police chiefs fast‑track new surveillance: the paperwork is outsourced, the grant eats the upfront cost, and even when there is a formal paper trail, the practical checks from residents, councils, and procurement rules often get watered down or bypassed.
On paper, these systems arrive “for free” through a federal grant; in practice, they lock cities into recurring software, subscription, and data‑hosting fees that quietly turn into permanent budget lines—and a lasting surveillance infrastructure—as soon as police and prosecutors start to rely on them. In Santa Cruz, California, the police department explicitly sought to use a DHS-funded SHSP grant to pay for a new citywide network of Flock ALPR cameras at the city’s entrances and exits, with local funds covering additional cameras. In Sumner, Washington, a $50,000 grant was used to cover the entire first year of a Flock system — including installation and maintenance — after which the city is on the hook for roughly $39,000 every year in ongoing fees. The free grant money opens the door, but local governments are left with years of financial, political, and permanent surveillance entanglements they never fully vetted.
The most dangerous cost of this “free” funding is not just budgetary; it is the way it ties local systems into federal data pipelines. Since 9/11, DHS has used these grant streams to build a nationwide network of at least 79–80 state and regional fusion centers that integrate and share data from federal, state, local, tribal, and private partners. Research shows that state fusion centers rely heavily on the DHS Homeland Security Grant Program (especially SHSP and UASI) to “mature their capabilities,” with some centers reporting that 100 percent of their annual expenditures are covered by these grants.
Civil rights investigations have documented how this funding architecture creates a backdoor channel for ICE and other federal agencies to access local surveillance data for their own purposes. A recent report by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project (S.T.O.P.) describes ICE agents using a Philadelphia‑area fusion center to query the city’s ALPR network to track undocumented drivers in a self‑described sanctuary city.
Ultimately, federal grants follow the same script as trials and foundation gifts: what looks “free” ends up costing communities their data, their sanctuary protections, and their power over how local surveillance is used.
Protecting Yourself Against “Free” Technology
The most important protection against “free” surveillance technology is to reject it outright. Cities do not have to accept federal grants, vendor trials, or philanthropic donations. Saying no to “free” tech is not just a policy choice; it is a political power that local governments possess and can exercise. Communities and their elected officials can and should refuse surveillance systems that arrive through federal grants, vendor pilots, or private donations, regardless of how attractive the initial price tag appears.
For those cities that have already accepted surveillance technology, the imperative is equally clear: shut it down. When a community has rejected use of a spying tool, the capabilities, equipment, and data collected from that tool should be shut off immediately. Full stop.
And for any surveillance technology that remains in operation, even temporarily, there must be clear rules: when and how equipment is used, how that data is retained and shared, who owns data and how companies can access and use it, transparency requirements, and consequences for any misuse and abuse.
“Free” surveillance technology is never free. Someone profits or gains power from it. Police technology vendors, federal agencies, and wealthy donors do not offer these systems out of generosity; they offer them because surveillance serves their interests, not ours. That is the real cost of “free” surveillance.
The thing with an invasion is that it makes enemies of everyone being invaded, even those who may nominally support the end goal. Law enforcement officers and officials are no exception, especially when they see the invading force creating problems they shouldn’t be expected to solve.
Trump has treated multiple American cities like war zones. Of course, they’ve always been cities overseen by members of the Democratic party, which actually makes this a lot worse, since it shows everyone — including local law enforcement — that this isn’t actually about enforcing laws.
This dates all the way back to Trump sending National Guard troops to Los Angeles to assist with handling what the administration constantly referred to as “violent protests,” despite all evidence to the contrary. Law enforcement officials made it clear they could handle the protests that were happening and that adding National Guard units to the hundreds of federal officers would only make things worse.
And, of course, that’s exactly what happened. This has repeated itself in every city this regime has invaded. When local cops bristle at the incursion or officials make it clear they don’t feel obligated to finish the fights the fed’s roving gang of kidnappers pick, the administration claims the representatives of the cities it’s invaded just don’t love America enough.
None of that ultimately matters. The administration will continue to treat every complaint as sedition and every protester as a terrorist. Its officers will go far beyond what any pack of rogue cops would dare to do — past bending or breaking rules to simply acting as though there are no rules at all.
Some local and state law-enforcement leaders who have seen the agency’s tactics up close are voicing concerns that agents have strayed from the administration’s stated focus on public-safety threats.
In Maine, Sheriff Kevin Joyce was among the local law-enforcement officials who met with border czar Tom Homan nearly a year ago to hear the Trump administration’s immigration-enforcement priority: the removal of people with serious criminal records.
It was a mission the 39-year law-enforcement veteran could support.
But on Thursday, Joyce publicly issued blistering criticism of federal agents, accusing ICE of “bush-league policing” after he said they detained one of his corrections officers, a migrant authorized to work in the U.S., on a roadside in Portland, Maine.
In Minnesota, it’s even worse. Federal officers have executed two Minneapolis residents in broad daylight (and wounded another). In both cases, local law enforcement was told it was not allowed to investigate these shootings.
After a federal agent shot and killed a man on Saturday, Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara said he was told over the radio his local officers weren’t needed.
O’Hara ordered his officers not to leave the crime scene. He then requested the state’s top criminal investigators take the case, but when Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension investigators arrived they were blocked by federal Homeland Security officers, the bureau said.
[…]
It was the first time Evans could recall state investigators with jurisdiction over a crime scene being denied access by federal officers.
“We’re in uncharted territory here,” he said. The Department of Homeland Security didn’t immediately reply to a request for comment.
That’s fucked up. This isn’t any better:
Regular citizens aren’t the only ones complaining to police about ICE. On Tuesday, several police chiefs in the Minneapolis-St. Paul area held an unusual press conference: They said federal agents had stopped, along with local residents, some off-duty police officers “for no cause” and asked them to prove their citizenship.
Mark Bruley, the police chief of Brooklyn Park, a Minneapolis suburb, said chiefs had received “endless complaints” and that off-duty police officers—all people of color—had experienced the same treatment. In one case, he said, one of his officers was stopped as she drove past ICE. The agents boxed her in, knocked her phone from her hand when she tried to record them, and had their guns drawn, he said.
“If it’s happening to our officers, it pains me to think of how many of our community members it is happening to every day,” Bruley said.
Even if the administration can see what’s happening, it’s fifty-fifty whether it recognizes the danger of what it is and just doesn’t care or is simply too brutish to see the future it’s creating.
The administration complains about sanctuary cities and demands every law enforcement agency serve its needs, no matter what nastiness it chooses to engage in. But not every law enforcement official (along with many of the people who work for them) is interested in damaging whatever long-term relationships they might have built with the communities they serve just because the federal government wants some fuck buddies while it’s in town.
And none of this is going to go away, no matter how many times violent stooges like (suddenly former) Border Patrol head Greg Bovino says blatantly untrue things during press conferences:
“Everything we do every day is legal, ethical, moral, well-grounded in law.”
Not a single word of that is true. And the cops you expect to back you up when you engage in illegal, immoral, or unethical actions aren’t interested in helping you dig yourself out of your own holes. DHS components no longer engage in good faith with law enforcement when hunting down migrants. Nor do they cooperate with the locals when they have questions about agents’ actions.
Administration leaders think the country serves the federal government, rather than the other way around. And as often as cops can be just as awful as these federal interlopers, at least there’s a modicum of oversight still in operation that might occasionally deter, if not actually punish, wrongdoing by officers. None of that exists at the federal level. Federal officers aren’t expected to answer to anyone and they know it. That much is obvious from their everyday behavior.
But the federal government needs the support of local law enforcement, especially one that thinks it’s going to be able to oppress its way out of any situation it puts itself in. Losing the rank-and-file is something a lot of GOP legislators can’t afford, not with the midterms coming up. This party is poison and even those you’d expect to have the administration’s back are beginning to back away from America’s most toxic asset as quickly as possible.
It’s no secret that 2025 has givenAmericansplentytoprotestabout. But as news cameras showed protesters filling streets of cities across the country, law enforcement officers—including U.S. Border Patrol agents—were quietly watching those same streets through different lenses: Flock Safety automated license plate readers (ALPRs) that tracked every passing car.
Through an analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock Safety’s servers, we discovered that more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock’s national network of surveillance data in connection with protest activity. In some cases, law enforcement specifically targeted known activist groups, demonstrating how mass surveillance technology increasingly threatens our freedom to demonstrate.
Flock Safety provides ALPR technology to thousands of law enforcement agencies. The company installs cameras throughout their jurisdictions, and these cameras photograph every car that passes, documenting the license plate, color, make, model and other distinguishing characteristics. This data is paired with time and location, and uploaded to a massive searchable database. Flock Safety encourages agencies to share the data they collect broadly with other agencies across the country. It is common for an agency to search thousands of networks nationwide even when they don’t have reason to believe a targeted vehicle left the region.
Via public records requests, EFF obtained datasets representing more than 12 million searches logged by more than 3,900 agencies between December 2024 and October 2025. The data shows that agencies logged hundreds of searches related to the 50501 protests in February, the Hands Off protests in April, the No Kings protests in June and October, and other protests in between.
The Tulsa Police Department in Oklahoma was one of the most consistent users of Flock Safety’s ALPR system for investigating protests, logging at least 38 such searches. This included running searches that corresponded to a protest against deportation raids in February, a protest at Tulsa City Hall in support of pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil in March, and the No Kings protest in June. During the most recent No Kings protests in mid-October, agencies such as the Lisle Police Department in Illinois, the Oro Valley Police Department in Arizona, and the Putnam County (Tenn.) Sheriff’s Office all ran protest-related searches.
While EFF and other civil liberties groups argue the law should require a search warrant for such searches, police are simply prompted to enter text into a “reason” field in the Flock Safety system. Usually this is only a few words–or even just one.
In these cases, that word was often just “protest.”
Crime does sometimes occur at protests, whether that’s property damage, pick-pocketing, or clashes between groups on opposite sides of a protest. Some of these searches may have been tied to an actual crime that occurred, even though in most cases officers did not articulate a criminal offense when running the search. But the truth is, the only reason an officer is able to even search for a suspect at a protest is because ALPRs collected data on every single person who attended the protest.
Search and Dissent
2025 was an unprecedented year of street action. In June and again in October, thousands across the country mobilized under the banner of the “No Kings” movement—marches against government overreach, surveillance, and corporate power. By some estimates, the October demonstrations ranked among the largest single-day protests in U.S. history, filling the streets from Washington, D.C., to Portland, OR.
EFF identified 19 agencies that logged dozens of searches associated with the No Kings protests in June and October 2025. In some cases the “No Kings” was explicitly used, while in others the term “protest” was used but coincided with the massive protests.
Law Enforcement Agencies that Ran Searches Corresponding with “No Kings” Rallies * Anaheim Police Department, Calif. * Arizona Department of Public Safety * Beaumont Police Department, Texas * Charleston Police Department, SC * Flagler County Sheriff’s Office, Fla. * Georgia State Patrol * Lisle Police Department, Ill. * Little Rock Police Department, Ark. * Marion Police Department, Ohio * Morristown Police Department, Tenn. * Oro Valley Police Department, Ariz. * Putnam County Sheriff’s Office, Tenn. * Richmond Police Department, Va. * Riverside County Sheriff’s Office, Calif. * Salinas Police Department, Calif. * San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office, Calif. * Spartanburg Police Department, SC * Tempe Police Department, Ariz. * Tulsa Police Department, Okla. * US Border Patrol
For example:
In Washington state, the Spokane County Sheriff’s Office listed “no kings” as the reason for three searches on June 15, 2025 [Note: date corrected]. The agency queried 95 camera networks, looking for vehicles matching the description of “work van,” “bus” or “box truck.”
In Texas, the Beaumont Police Department ran six searches related to two vehicles on June 14, 2025, listing “KINGS DAY PROTEST” as the reason. The queries reached across 1,774 networks.
In California, the San Bernardino County Sheriff’s Office ran a single search for a vehicle across 711 networks, logging “no king” as the reason.
In Arizona, the Tempe Police Department made three searches for “ATL No Kings Protest” on June 15, 2025 searching through 425 networks. “ATL” is police code for “attempt to locate.” The agency appears to not have been looking for a particular plate, but for any red vehicle on the road during a certain time window.
But the No Kings protests weren’t the only demonstrations drawing law enforcement’s digital dragnet in 2025.
For example:
In Nevada’s state capital, the Carson City Sheriff’s Office ran three searches that correspond to the February 50501 Protests against DOGE and the Trump administration. The agency searched for two vehicles across 178 networks with “protest” as the reason.
In Florida, the Seminole County Sheriff’s Office logged “protest” for five searches that correspond to a local May Day rally.
In Alabama, the Homewood Police Department logged four searches in early July 2025 for three vehicles with “PROTEST CASE” and “PROTEST INV.” in the reason field. The searches, which probed 1,308 networks, correspond to protests against the police shooting of Jabari Peoples.
In Texas, the Lubbock Police Department ran two searches for a Tennessee license plate on March 15 that corresponds to a rally to highlight the mental health impact of immigration policies. The searches hit 5,966 networks, with the logged reason “protest veh.”
In Michigan, Grand Rapids Police Department ran five searches that corresponded with the Stand Up and Fight Back Rally in February. The searches hit roughly 650 networks, with the reason logged as “Protest.”
Someagencies have adopted policies that prohibit using ALPRs for monitoring activities protected by the First Amendment. Yet many officers probed the nationwide network with terms like “protest” without articulating an actual crime under investigation.
In a few cases, police were using Flock’s ALPR network to investigate threats made against attendees or incidents where motorists opposed to the protests drove their vehicle into crowds. For example, throughout June 2025, an Arizona Department of Public Safety officer logged three searches for “no kings rock threat,” and a Wichita (Kan.) Police Department officer logged 22 searches for various license plates under the reason “Crime Stoppers Tip of causing harm during protests.”
Even when law enforcement is specifically looking for vehicles engaged in potentially criminal behavior such as threatening protesters, it cannot be ignored that mass surveillance systems work by collecting data on everyone driving to or near a protest—not just those under suspicion.
Border Patrol’s Expanding Reach
As U.S. Border Patrol (USBP), ICE, and other federal agencies tasked with immigration enforcement have massively expanded operations into major cities, advocates for immigrants have responded through organized rallies, rapid-response confrontations, and extended presences at federal facilities.
USBP has made extensive use of Flock Safety’s system for immigration enforcement, but also to target those who object to its tactics. In June, a few days after the No Kings Protest, USBP ran three searches for a vehicle using the descriptor “Portland Riots.”
USBP also used the Flock Safety network to investigate a motorist who had “extended his middle finger” at Border Patrol vehicles that were transporting detainees. The motorist then allegedly drove in front of one of the vehicles and slowed down, forcing the Border Patrol vehicle to brake hard. An officer ran seven searches for his plate, citing “assault on agent” and “18 usc 111,” the federal criminal statute for assaulting, resisting or impeding a federal officer. The individual was charged in federal court in early August.
USBP had access to the Flock system during a trial period in the first half of 2025, but the company says it has since paused the agency’s access to the system. However, Border Patrol and other federal immigration authorities have been able to access the system’s data through local agencies who have run searches on their behalf or even lent them logins.
Targeting Animal Rights Activists
Law enforcement’s use of Flock’s ALPR network to surveil protesters isn’t limited to large-scale political demonstrations. Three agencies also used the system dozens of times to specifically target activists from Direct Action Everywhere (DxE), an animal-rights organization known for using civil disobedience tactics to expose conditions at factory farms.
Delaware State Police queried the Flock national network nine times in March 2025 related to DxE actions, logging reasons such as “DxE Protest Suspect Vehicle.” DxE advocates told EFF that these searches correspond to an investigation the organization undertook of a Mountaire Farms facility.
Additionally, the California Highway Patrol logged dozens of searches related to a “DXE Operation” throughout the day on May 27, 2025. The organization says this corresponds with an annual convening in California that typically ends in a direct action. Participants leave the event early in the morning, then drive across the state to a predetermined but previously undisclosed protest site. Also in May, the Merced County Sheriff’s Office in California logged two searches related to “DXE activity.”
As an organization engaged in direct activism, DxE has experienced criminalprosecution for its activities, and so the organization told EFF they were not surprised to learn they are under scrutiny from law enforcement, particularly considering how industrial farmers have collected and distributed their own intelligence to police.
The targeting of DxE activists reveals how ALPR surveillance extends beyond conventional and large-scale political protests to target groups engaged in activism that challenges powerful industries. For animal-rights activists, the knowledge that their vehicles are being tracked through a national surveillance network undeniably creates a chilling effect on their ability to organize and demonstrate.
Fighting Back Against ALPR
ALPR systems are designed to capture information on every vehicle that passes within view. That means they don’t just capture data on “criminals” but on everyone, all the time—and that includes people engaged in their First Amendment right to publicly dissent. Police are sitting on massive troves of data that can reveal who attended a protest, and this data shows they are not afraid to use it.
Our analysis only includes data where agencies explicitly mentioned protests or related terms in the “reason” field when documenting their search. It’s likely that scores more were conducted under less obvious pretexts and search reasons. According to our analysis, approximately 20 percent of all searches we reviewed listed vague language like “investigation,” “suspect,” and “query” in the reason field. Those terms could well be cover for spying on a protest, an abortion prosecution, or an officer stalking a spouse, and no one would be the wiser–including the agencies whose data was searched. Flock has said it will now require officers to select a specific crime under investigation, but that can and will also be used to obfuscate dubious searches.
For protestors, this data should serve as confirmation that ALPR surveillance has been and will be used to target activities protected by the First Amendment. Depending on your threat model, this means you should think carefully about how you arrive at protests, and explore options such as by biking, walking, carpooling, taking public transportation, or simply parking a little further away from the action. Our Surveillance Self-Defense project has more information on steps you could take to protect your privacy when traveling to and attending a protest.
For local officials, this should serve as another example of how systems marketed as protecting your community may actually threaten the values your communities hold most dear. The best way to protect people is to shut down these camera networks.
Everyone should have the right to speak up against injustice without ending up in a database.
A California judge ordered the end of a dragnet law enforcement program that surveilled the electrical smart meter data of thousands of Sacramento residents.
The Sacramento County Superior Court ruled that the surveillance program run by the Sacramento Municipal Utility District (SMUD) and police violated a state privacy statute, which bars the disclosure of residents’ electrical usage data with narrow exceptions. For more than a decade, SMUD coordinated with the Sacramento Police Department and other law enforcement agencies to sift through the granular smart meter data of residents without suspicion to find evidence of cannabis growing.
EFF and its co-counsel represent three petitioners in the case: the Asian American Liberation Network, Khurshid Khoja, and Alfonso Nguyen. They argued that the program created a host of privacy harms—including criminalizing innocent people, creating menacing encounters with law enforcement, and disproportionately harming the Asian community.
The court ruled that the challenged surveillance program was not part of any traditional law enforcement investigation. Investigations happen when police try to solve particular crimes and identify particular suspects. The dragnet that turned all 650,000 SMUD customers into suspects was not an investigation.
“[T]he process of making regular requests for all customer information in numerous city zip codes, in the hopes of identifying evidence that could possibly be evidence of illegal activity, without any report or other evidence to suggest that such a crime may have occurred, is not an ongoing investigation,” the court ruled, finding that SMUD violated its “obligations of confidentiality” under a data privacy statute.
Granular electrical usage data can reveal intimate details inside the home—including when you go to sleep, when you take a shower, when you are away, and other personal habits and demographics.
In creating and running the dragnet surveillance program, according to the court, SMUD and police “developed a relationship beyond that of utility provider and law enforcement.” Multiple times a year, the police asked SMUD to search its entire database of 650,000 customers to identify people who used a large amount of monthly electricity and to analyze granular 1-hour electrical usage data to identify residents with certain electricity “consumption patterns.” SMUD passed on more than 33,000 tips about supposedly “high” usage households to police.
While this is a victory, the Court unfortunately dismissed an alternate claim that the program violated the California Constitution’s search and seizure clause. We disagree with the court’s reasoning, which misapprehends the crux of the problem: At the behest of law enforcement, SMUD searches granular smart meter data and provides insights to law enforcement based on that granular data.
Going forward, public utilities throughout California should understand that they cannot disclose customers’ electricity data to law enforcement without any “evidence to support a suspicion” that a particular crime occurred.
EFF, along with Monty Agarwal of the law firm Vallejo, Antolin, Agarwal, Kanter LLP, brought and argued the case on behalf of Petitioners.
I’m not saying this unholy matrimony wouldn’t have occurred under any other regime, but it’s definitely the sort of thing that plays well with the Oval Office while it’s housing Donald Trump.
Both Flock Safety and Ring have weathered plenty of negative press, largely because they were doing the sort of thing they’re going back to doing now: turning private cameras into extensions of government surveillance networks.
Flock Safety began by pitching its products to some of the most secure people in the nation: wealthy white homeowners. Flock Safety became just another way for gated communities and HOAs to keep a tab on residents while also casting a skeptical eye towards anyone (or any vehicles) those running the cameras didn’t immediately recognize.
Then it invited cops to play with its equipment and install some of their own. It went from keeping black people out of white neighborhoods to becoming a tool to be wielded by cops as they searched for a woman who had terminated a pregnancy — not because cops cared about her well-being, but at the behest of her apparently abusive boyfriend. Law enforcement investigators and officials claimed the nationwide searches for the person seeking an abortion was all about finding her safely. Even after internal documents revealed it was actually about finding her in hopes of pressing charges for violating Texas’s abortion ban, Flock Safety has continued to criticize journalists for reporting on this apparent abuse of its camera network.
Ring democratized front door surveillance, for better or worse. It gave people a cheap option for keeping crime off their literal doorstep. But it also invited cops along for the ride, giving them free cameras to hand out to citizens with the implied suggestion a free camera would result in warrantless access to footage any time the cops felt like looking at it.
Ring finally rolled back its carte blanche cop access and demanded a bit more paperwork from law enforcement before allowing it to raid its cloud storage. Flock Safety — in response to congressional criticism — made vague statements about limiting abuse of camera access by law enforcement. Of course, those words were meaningless, as Senator Ron Wyden recently pointed out in a letter to Flock Safety CEO Garret Langley:
In August, 9 News in Denver revealed that Flock granted U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) access to its systems, enabling the agency to search data collected by Flock’s cameras, including using the National Lookup Tool. Officials from Flock subsequently confirmed to my office in September that the company provided access to CBP, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the Secret Service, and the Naval Criminal Investigative Service as part of a pilot earlier this year. Flock told my office that during the pilot, which has now ended, CBP and HSI conducted approximately 200 and 175 searches respectively. Flock also confirmed that itmisled its state and local law enforcement customers, telling my office that “due to internal miscommunication, customers were inaccurately informed that Flock did not have any relationship with DHS, while pilot programs with sub-agencies of DHS were briefly active.”
The abortion investigation described above is also mentioned in the letter, which closes with Ron Wyden telling the company that no one should trust what Flock Safety says because when it’s not misleading people, it’s both incapable and unwilling to place meaningful restrictions on law enforcement access to its nationwide network of cameras:
The privacy protection that Flock promised to Oregonians — that Flock software will automatically examine the reason provided by law enforcement officers for terms indicating an abortion- or immigration-related search — is meaningless when law enforcement officials provide generic reasons like “investigation” or “crime.” Likewise, Flock’s filters are meaningless if no reason for a search is provided in the first place. While the search reasons collected by Flock, obtained by press and activists through open records requests, have occasionally revealed searches for immigration and abortion enforcement, these are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Presumably, most officers using Flock to hunt down immigrants and women who have received abortions are not going to type that in as the reason for their search. And, regardless, given that Flock has washed its hands of any obligation to audit its customers, Flock customers have no reason to trust a search reason provided by another agency.
I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable, and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them.
Law enforcement agencies will soon have easier access to footage captured by Amazon’s Ring smart cameras. In a partnership announced this week, Amazon will allow approximately 5,000 local law enforcement agencies to request access to Ring camera footage via surveillance platforms from Flock Safety.
[…]
According to Flock’s announcement, its Ring partnership allows local law enforcement members to use Flock software “to send a direct post in the Ring Neighbors app with details about the investigation and request voluntary assistance.” Requests must include “specific location and timeframe of the incident, a unique investigation code, and details about what is being investigated,” and users can look at the requests anonymously, Flock said.
[…]
Flock said its local law enforcement users will gain access to Ring Community Requests in “the coming months.”
We absolutely didn’t need these two major players in the private surveillance market to team up and offer expanded access to US law enforcement — especially when so much of US law enforcement is focused on the “criminal” acts listed in Wyden’s letter: abortions and immigration.
According to Ars Technica’s reporting, Ring is the most active participant in this new surveillance dragnet. First, Ring rolled back its promise to limit law enforcement access to Ring footage by partnering with Axon, a heavy-hitter in the US body camera marketplace. Then it decided to court one of the rivals in its own marketplace, which means both companies can still pretend to hold unique ideals while ensuring the bastard child of this coupling will render those ideals irrelevant.
Flock says that its cameras don’t use facial recognition, which has been criticized for racial biases. But local law enforcement agencies using Flock will soon have access to footage from Ring cameras with facial recognition.
Both companies will be able to blame each other the next time abusive access is revealed. And Ring’s network will presumably gain features it doesn’t have currently via its meshing with Flock, like license plate recognition and an algorithm that can be applied to Ring footage that allows cops to do things it can’t with Ring alone, like search for suspects using nothing but vehicle or clothing descriptions.
And this assurance is especially meaningless, given what’s already known about both of these companies:
Amazon and Flock say their collaboration will only involve voluntary customers and local enforcement agencies.
When both companies store recordings in their own clouds, “voluntary” is beside the point. Law enforcement can just approach either company directly with warrants or subpoenas and get what has been denied to them by these companies’ customers. And restraining searches to “local law enforcement” agencies is impossible if neither company is interested in limiting searches to local areas and/or taking steps to prevent local agencies from performing searches on behalf of federal officers.
Even if both companies take heat for doing this, they’ll still do it. After all, they’ve got an entire administration standing behind them that’s willing to call anyone who questions or criticizes this unofficial merger a friend of criminals, if not an actual enemy of the nation.
Just when you think corporate content moderation can’t get any more absurd, Apple has managed to redefine “protected class” in a way that would make Orwell proud. According to internal correspondence obtained by Migrant Insider, Apple has removed the DeICER app—which allowed users to log sightings of ICE enforcement activity—by invoking guidelines normally reserved for protecting marginalized communities from hate speech.
Apple justified this by treating federal immigration agents as a protected class equivalent to groups protected from discrimination based on “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin.”
According to internal correspondence reviewed by Migrant Insider, Apple told developer Rafael Concepcion that the app violated Guideline 1.1.1, which prohibits “defamatory, discriminatory, or mean-spirited content” directed at “religion, race, sexual orientation, gender, national/ethnic origin, or other targeted groups.”
But Apple’s justification went further. “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group,” the company wrote in its removal notice.
The decision effectively treats federal immigration agents as a protected class — a novel interpretation of Apple’s hate-speech policy that shields one of the most powerful arms of government from public scrutiny.
Apple is now treating federal agents—who are public employees exercising government power—as if they’re a vulnerable minority group in need of protection from “discrimination.” This isn’t just a misapplication of content policies; it’s a fundamental inversion of what those policies were designed to do.
Of course, this is not entirely unprecedented. As we’ve covered over the years, whenever laws and rules against hate speech exist, inevitably the powerful seek to use them to protect themselves rather than those who are actually marginalized or vulnerable.
The DeICER app, developed by former Syracuse journalism professor Rafael Concepcion, was designed as a civic accountability tool—which seems like a good thing. Users could log ICE enforcement activity in their communities, with each report automatically expiring after four hours and requiring GPS verification within a quarter mile of the reported activity. As Concepcion explained to Migrant Insider:
“It isn’t meant to harvest people,” Concepcion said. “It is meant to inform people.”
But Apple wasn’t done with this particular category of apps. As 404 Media reports, the company also removed Eyes Up, an app that preserved videos documenting ICE abuses from social media platforms and news reports. Unlike real-time tracking apps, Eyes Up was purely about creating an archive of publicly available information.
Apple removed an app for preserving TikToks, Instagram reels, news reports, and videos documenting abuses by ICE, 404 Media has learned. The app, called Eyes Up, differs from other banned apps such as ICEBlock which were designed to report sightings of ICE officials in real-time to warn local communities. Eyes Up, meanwhile, was more of an aggregation service pooling together information to preserve evidence in case the material is needed in the future in court.
As the Eyes Up administrator told 404 Media:
“Our goal is government accountability, we aren’t even doing real-time tracking…. I think the [Trump] admin is just embarrassed by how many incriminating videos we have.”
This is part of a broader pattern we’ve seen recently. Just last week, we covered how the Department of Justice explicitly demanded Apple remove the ICEBlock app, with Attorney General Pam Bondi bragging that “We reached out to Apple today demanding they remove the ICEBlock app from their App Store—and Apple did so.”
But now we’re seeing Apple go even further, expanding this logic to proactively shield law enforcement from accountability tools—whether as a retroactive justification for caving to government demands or as anticipatory compliance with future pressure.
With DeICER, Concepcion appealed to Apple, pointing out that this wasn’t a tool for “targeting or tracking of law enforcement.” And yet, Apple rejected the appeal, even as courts have made it clear that you absolutely can videotape law enforcement actions in public.
Apple didn’t care:
But Apple rejected that reasoning. In its final ruling, the company’s App Review Board upheld the removal, stating: “Information provided to Apple by law enforcement shows that your app violates Guideline 1.1.1 … because its purpose is to provide location information about law enforcement officers that can be used to harm such officers individually or as a group.”
So we’re right back to the Guideline 1.1.1 bit, where we see that Apple is clearly defining “law enforcement” as a “protected class” which just seems difficult to justify when law enforcement, far from being oppressed, appears to be the oppressors.
And, yes, I’ll be the first to tell you that content moderation at scale is impossible to do well, and that applies to app stores as well. But when you see a pattern this consistent—and this convenient for state power—pointing to scale problems feels inadequate. This looks less like algorithmic confusion and more like Apple systematically bending its policies to accommodate government preferences while trying to maintain plausible deniability.
This reasoning is deeply problematic on multiple levels. First, it treats documentation of public officials’ public actions as equivalent to hate speech against marginalized groups. Second, it accepts law enforcement’s own assessment of what constitutes “harm” to them without any independent review. Third, it creates a precedent where any app that allows citizens to track government activity could be banned as “discriminatory” against public officials.
Apple’s anti-harassment guidelines were created to protect actually vulnerable groups from genuinely harmful content. Now those same guidelines are being weaponized to protect one of the most powerful arms of the federal government from public scrutiny. And that’s happening at a time when actual marginalized groups are the direct targets of this out of control law enforcement agency that has been “unleashed” by the likes of Donald Trump, Kristi Noem, Tom Homan, and Pam Bondi.
This isn’t about protecting people from discrimination—it’s about protecting power from accountability. ICE agents aren’t a marginalized group facing systemic oppression. They’re federal law enforcement officers wielding enormous government power, often with minimal oversight. The idea that documenting their public activities constitutes “discrimination” turns the concept of civil rights on its head.
At a moment when ICE is conducting mass deportation operations with documented civil liberties abuses, Apple has decided that the real problem is citizens having tools to document and preserve evidence of those abuses. It’s hard to imagine a more backwards approach to civil liberties.
What’s next? Will reporting on police misconduct be considered “discriminatory” against law enforcement? Will documenting government corruption be classified as “hate speech” against public officials? Apple’s logic here opens the door to treating any form of government accountability as harassment of a “protected class.”
This is exactly the kind of corporate deference to state power that should alarm anyone who cares about democratic accountability. When private companies start treating the documentation of government actions as equivalent to hate speech against minorities, we’ve crossed that dangerous line from content moderation into state protection.
The most charitable interpretation is that Apple simply misunderstood what these apps do and mechanically applied policies designed for very different situations. But given the pattern of removals and the company’s apparent willingness to accept law enforcement’s framing without question, it looks more like a deliberate choice to prioritize government preferences over civil liberties.
If documenting the actions of federal agents is now “hate speech,” then we’ve fundamentally lost the plot on what civil rights protections are supposed to accomplish. They’re meant to protect the powerless from the powerful, not the other way around.
It’s probably too much to ask, but I hope California law enforcement agencies will remember who to direct their hate at if this bill becomes law. It’s not the “liberals” running the state. It’s the Trump administration and its mass deportation efforts. ICE and its actions have always been controversial, but it took a group of bigots serving non-consecutive terms to really unleash its inherent ugliness.
What we’ve been seeing since Trump’s return to office has been ICE and anti-brown people sentiment at its worst. ICE raids Home Deport parking lots, neighborhoods, and swap meets, rather than performing targeted arrests of truly dangerous undocumented immigrants. But this insistence on masking officers and hiding outward designations of their originating agency is something specifically tied to Trump’s second administration.
Lawmakers in California passed a bill on Thursday banning most local and federal law enforcement officers from covering their faces during operations, including immigration enforcement.
Senate Bill 627, known as the No Secret Police Act, was introduced by Democratic state Sens. Scott Wiener of San Francisco and Jesse Arreguin of Berkeley in June after immigration operations ramped up across the state as part of President Trump’s crackdown on illegal immigration. The bill will now head to Gov. Gavin Newsom’s desk for final approval.
The bill [PDF] opens up with the legislators’ refusal to allow law enforcement to take advantage of preexisting double-standard:
Existing law makes it a misdemeanor to wear a mask, false whiskers, or any personal disguise, as specified, with the purpose of evading or escaping discovery, recognition, or identification while committing a public offense, or for concealment, flight, evasion, or escape from arrest or conviction for any public offense.
This bill would make it a crime for a law enforcement officer to wear a facial covering in the performance of their duties, except as specified. The bill would define law enforcement officer as anyone designated by California law as a peace officer who is employed by a city, county, or other local agency, and any officer or agent of a federal law enforcement agency or law enforcement agency of another state, or any person acting on behalf of a federal law enforcement agency or agency of another state. The bill would make a violation of these provisions punishable as an infraction or a misdemeanor, as specified. By creating a new crime, this bill would impose a state-mandated local program.
This won’t stop ICE and other federal officers from wearing masks while terrorizing the populace, of course. But it will at least prevent local law enforcement from blending in with Trump’s masked goon squads, which might discourage them from pitching in with questionable “round up all the brown people” raids performed by ICE and its federal partners.
Added to the bill are a lot of official legislative declarations — ones that point out the numerous problems created by officers who choose to disguise themselves when performing their public duties.
(a)[T]he routine use of facial coverings by law enforcement officers has significant implications for public perception, officer-community interactions, and accountability.
(b) Whether intentional intended or not, members of the public may experience fear or intimidation when approached by officers whose faces are obscured. This perception can heighten defensive behaviors and unnecessarily escalate situations.
(c) Facial coverings limit the visibility of facial expressions, which are essential components of nonverbal communication. In high-stress or emotionally charged interactions, the inability to read an officer’s expression may lead to misinterpretation of tone or intent, increasing the risk of conflict escalation.
(d) The visibility of an officer’s face is vital for promoting transparency, facilitating communication, and building trust between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.
(e) When officers are not readily identifiable, it increases the risk of impersonation by unauthorized individuals, which further undermines public trust, endangers public safety, and hinders legitimate law enforcement operations.
This exposes the lie that is used most frequently by law enforcement: that masking up makes officers “safer.” It doesn’t. It creates a ton of negative side effects, many of which endanger people on both sides of the law enforcement equation. What it definitely does not do is make officers “safer.”
On top of that, there’s the damage done to the public’s relationship with law enforcement, which has never been great. Destroying trust only takes a few self-serving actions by cops who’d rather have their power completely decoupled from any responsibility. Rebuilding this trust takes maximum effort and years of work — something almost no law enforcement agency (federal or local) is willing to do. So, the baseline is trust that has likely been irreparably damaged. And now, law enforcement seems to think the best way to do cop business is by destroying what little trust remains by dressing up like cartel death squads while enforcing civil laws pertaining to citizenship.
Cops will no doubt complain about this new mandate if it’s codified. Fuck them. They had all the time in the world to repair their relationship with the public. And if they’ve chosen to be more like ICE in its current iteration, they absolutely need to have this dubious privilege taken out of their hands.
