An open letter to State Governors & Legislatures (Calif. only)
Ban ALPR Mass Surveillance, Not Just Flock
30 so far! Help us get to 50 signers!
Stop the shell game. Communities dropping Flock contracts are simply switching to Axon and other competitors that do the exact same thing — mass surveillance of every driver, regardless of suspicion. The problem was never the company name on the camera. Ban automated license plate reader surveillance outright.
Axon is actually worse. Unlike Flock, Axon's cameras livestream video alongside plate scanning, store data with no maximum retention limit, and feed everything into an AI system called Fusus that cross-references footage from dozens of devices simultaneously. Axon already contracts with ICE. The infrastructure for federal mass surveillance of ordinary drivers is being built right now, one city contract at a time.
The Electronic Frontier Foundation and the ACLU have both said clearly that swapping one ALPR vendor for another solves nothing. The civil liberties violations are baked into the technology itself. Pass legislation that bans ALPR mass surveillance entirely, with strict warrant requirements and mandatory deletion deadlines for any system that remains in operation.