Recent coverage of Flock Safety, the fast‑growing US surveillance technology company, reveals how opposition to automated license plate readers is playing out at the local level.
In South Carolina, officials have been sparring over whether to install 25 new cameras, a dispute that reflects broader questions about cost, oversight, and how much surveillance communities are willing to accept. The city of Los Angeles recently broke its contract with Flock Safety, though Flock’s CEO argues that the suspension should be temporary while the police department revises its rules.
These cancellations are in large part driven by public concern around a system designed to enable mass surveillance, which is susceptible to serious abuses, including biased policing and privacy violations.
To track such surveillance, journalists and researchers are increasingly turning to a free tool called the Atlas of Surveillance, a collaboration between the renowned digital privacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation and the University of Nevada, Reno. The site has become a go‑to source for mapping police technology — which also includes drones, facial-recognition cameras and body cameras — with a searchable database that’s often more dependable than alternatives.
With the Atlas of Surveillance tool, you enter a city, county, state, law enforcement agency or vendor in the US and select which technology you’re interested in tracking. You’ll get a list of details based on your search, including links to public records or news articles.
“We frequently run into situations where local councilpeople don’t even know that a certain tool is in use,” said Beryl Lipton, Electronic Frontier Foundation senior investigative researcher. “Learning about a technology we have logged in the Atlas of Surveillance is meant to help people have conversations [about] whether that tool is appropriate for local use, start asking questions, and advocate for standards around how their police can or can’t use this equipment.”
Surveilling surveillance
While other tools for tracking Flock cameras and similar surveillance systems exist, I prefer the EFF’s approach, which uses reliable crowdsourced data from specific volunteers, including University of Nevada students and staff, as well as experienced researchers. These volunteers use a variety of information, including government documents, press releases, news stories and confirmed social media posts, to create lists of exactly which surveillance technologies local police or sheriff departments are using, as well as when they were adopted.
Deflock, another popular crowdsourced app for reporting Flock camera locations, has an open-source design that leaves it vulnerable to false reports from people who only think they’re seeing a surveillance device. Self-reports are also becoming less reliable as surveillance cameras are being hidden in speed signs and cacti.
I tried the Atlas tool with several location searches, including Albany, Georgia, where five police officers were fired and arrested in July on charges of misusing the city’s Flock system. Sure enough, I could see exactly when Albany began its Flock program, among other details about the technology it uses.
“While we may know that a police department has a tool, we may not know that they don’t have a governing policy or what is in the policy they have, like how long the data is retained,” Lipton told me.
Lipton recommends that users pair the Atlas tool with the EFF’s Street-Level Surveillance hub, which offers deeper documentation, including details on third‑party vendors that collaborate with law enforcement.
The Atlas database isn’t perfect, and the volunteers can do only so much. In my own searches, I found that my home city offered accurate listings for traffic cameras, but didn’t mention the period when it adopted Flock automated license plate readers last year, before removing them after public complaint. I’ve seen similar patterns in other cities with comparable histories, suggesting the database may emphasize active programs or exclude portions of older records.
Resources like the Atlas of Surveillance give residents a clearer view of the technologies their police departments use, information that can otherwise be difficult to obtain. As I’ve covered before, some cities will carefully omit the name “Flock” when announcing new surveillance or monitoring programs, even if they are using the brand’s drones or ALPR cameras.
If you’d like to volunteer for the Atlas of Surveillance, you can select the Collaborate option to submit a datapoint for consideration.
