From Pasadena, California to Lexington, Kentucky to Menasha, Wisconsin, to Newark, New Jersey, the surveillance company Flock Safety is blanketing American cities with dangerously powerful and unregulated automatic license plate recognition (ALPR) cameras. While license plate readers have been around for some time, Flock is the first to create a nationwide mass-surveillance system out of its customers’ cameras.

Working with police departments, neighborhood watches, and other private customers, Flock not only allows private camera owners to create their own “hot lists” that will generate alarms when listed plates are spotted, but also runs all plates against state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center (NCIC). Flock’s goal is to expand to “every city in the United States,” and its cameras are already in use in over 2,000 cities in at least 42 states.

Unlike a targeted ALPR camera system that is designed to take pictures of license plates, check the plates against local hot lists, and then flush the data if there’s no hit, Flock is building a giant camera network that records people’s comings and goings across the nation, and then makes that data available for search by any of its law enforcement customers. Such a system provides even small-town sheriffs access to a sweeping and powerful mass-surveillance tool, and allows big actors like federal agencies and large urban police departments to access the comings and goings of vehicles in even the smallest of towns. And every new customer that buys and installs the company’s cameras extends Flock’s network, contributing to the creation of a centralized mass surveillance system of Orwellian scope. Motorola Solutions, a competitor to Flock, is pursuing a similar business model.

If the police or government leaders are pushing for Flock or another centralized mass-surveillance ALPR system in your community, we urge you to oppose it, full stop. You can do this by urging your local councilperson or other elected representatives to adopt our recommendations into law, attending public meetings and hearings, and raising the profile of the issue by writing letters to the editor and op-eds. You can also use social media to highlight the issues — be sure to tag your elected officials — including by sharing this blog post. If you’re an elected official or community leader, you may also be able to engage directly with your police department — we have found that some departments are willing to do so.

In a few places, residents concerned about privacy and over-policing have successfully blocked their police departments’ acquisition of Flock or other ALPR systems. But, in many other cities, those efforts have been thwarted. In communities where such systems can’t be stopped entirely, we can still help protect our and our neighbors’ civil liberties by working with our local police department and elected officials to ensure that local ALPR cameras do not feed into a mass surveillance system that lets potentially every law enforcement department in the world spy on the residents and visitors of any city in America.

We don’t find every use of ALPRs objectionable. For example, we do not generally object to using them to check license plates against lists of stolen cars, for AMBER Alerts, or for toll collection, provided they are deployed and used fairly and subject to proper checks and balances, such as ensuring devices are not disproportionately deployed in low-income communities and communities of color, and that the “hot lists” they are run against are legitimate and up to date. But there’s no reason the technology should be used to create comprehensive records of everybody’s comings and goings — and that is precisely what ALPR databases like Flock’s are doing. In our country, the government should not be tracking us unless it has individualized suspicion that we’re engaged in wrongdoing. We more fully lay out our concerns with this technology in our white paper, and in this 2013 report.

American Civil Liberties Union

Fast-Growing Company Flock is Building a New AI-Driven Mass-Surveillance System

Flock's adoption of new technology may expand current government surveillance reach and erode Americans’ privacy.

Many police departments neither understand nor endorse Flock’s nationwide, mass surveillance-driven approach to ALPR use, but are adopting the company’s cameras simply because other police departments in their region are doing so. As such, they may be amenable to compromise. That might even include using another vendor that does not tie its cameras into a mass-surveillance system. In other cases, you may be able to get your police department or local legislators to add addendums to Flock’s standard contract that limit its ALPR system’s mass surveillance capabilities and highly permissive data sharing.

In those situations, the three most important areas for regulation and negotiation are how long the data is retained, who the data is shared with, and how that data is used by law enforcement. We obtained samples of Flock’s Government Agency Customer Agreements with the Greensboro, North Carolina Police Department and other Flock contracts with local police. Below is suggested contract language across these three areas, based on these agreements, that you can use in your local advocacy efforts.

Whether ALPRs are being used for Amber Alerts, toll collection, or to identify stolen vehicles, a license plate can be run against a watchlist in seconds. The police do not need records of every person’s coming and goings, including trips to doctor’s offices, religious institutions, and political gatherings.

New Hampshire state law, which requires law enforcement to delete non-hit license plate capture data within three minutes, is a good model. But you should get the shortest retention period you can in your community. From worst to best, here are three approaches that can be taken to the retention of ALPR data:

One of the most important privacy-protective steps you can take is to restrict your community’s ALPR system to local use, meaning local ALPR scans are only checked against locally developed watch lists. Allowing local ALPR data to be used by outside law enforcement creates significant risks. Your local ALPR data could be used to enforce anti-abortion or anti-immigrant laws from other jurisdictions, or even to assist foreign, authoritarian regimes in hunting down political opponents and refugees living in America (Flock’s default provisions give the company a “worldwide” license to use its customers’ APLR data).

These risks are simply not worth taking, especially since there are many other companies that sell locally focused systems. From worst to best, here are three data sharing and use approaches:

As much as we might hope that all police watchlists were 100 percent reliable, we know they are not. In fact, the largest and most commonly used national watch list — the National Crime Information Center (NCIC) database — does not even comply with the 1974 United States Privacy Act’s basic accuracy, reliability, and completeness requirements. That means allowing your ALPR data to be run against such databases will subject anyone living in or visiting your town to unjustified arrest and detention, which is an especially dangerous proposition for members of vulnerable, already overpoliced communities. Again, from worst to best, here are three database use approaches:

In the end, neither local police departments, nor government officials, nor residents should blindly accept Flock’s model simply because it advances Flock’s bottom line, or because other jurisdictions have unwisely chosen to do so. We continue to believe that using Flock cameras should be opposed outright. But where that battle can’t be won, then any system should at least be confined to the community itself and not made part of a national and international mass-surveillance system.

Access to abortion has been decimated in the United States since June when the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade and took away our right to control our own bodies. Laws banning abortion are now in effect in more than a dozen states, denying more than 20 million people of reproductive age access to essential health care. And as hideous as this is, we know that is only the latest step in their plan to ban abortion and other essential health care nationwide.

The next step in their plan is an attempt to impose a nationwide ban on mifepristone — one of two medications in a regimen that accounts for more than half the abortions in this country. This would be a ban in every state in the nation — even in states where abortion is legal and protected under state law.

Here is how they are trying to do it: Days after the midterms when voters came out overwhelmingly in support of abortion rights, anti-abortion extremists filed a baseless lawsuit seeking an emergency ruling ordering the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) to withdraw the approval for mifepristone it issued more than 20 years ago. An adverse ruling here could take mifepristone off the shelves and bar health care professionals from prescribing it in every state in the nation.

In any rational universe, this case would be laughed out of court on multiple grounds. Mifepristone was approved more than two decades ago and has been used by millions of people for early abortion care and to treat miscarriages. Study after study has confirmed its safety and efficacy, and its critical role in abortion and miscarriage care. The claims in this case have no basis in law and distort decades of scientific evidence.

The case was filed by an organization known as Alliance Defending Freedom (ADF), which has been labeled a hate group, and helped write the Mississippi law which the Supreme Court used to overturn Roe v. Wade. They are going so far as to use a 150-year-old anti-obscenity law, the Comstock Act, to argue that it’s illegal to send or receive mifepristone, and any other medication or device used to provide an abortion, through the mail. That’s a wild claim that has never been accepted.

But if these claims are so wild and unprecedented, why are we concerned? Here’s the thing: ADF was able to hand-select their judge and just happened to pick one who, before he was appointed to the bench by President Trump, worked for an organization that represents business owners who discriminate against LGBTQ people and public school employees who coerce students to pray on school grounds.

And since his appointment to the bench, he has issued a series of radical decisions on everything from immigrants’ rights to trans justice to birth control. In fact, the judge has said it was an “open question” whether politicians could make it a crime to use contraception. That’s right — whether states can outlaw birth control. This is the judge who will decide whether mifepristone can remain on the market.

We won’t let this happen without a fight. We’ve been doing everything in our power to increase access to medication abortion and other essential reproductive health care. In recent years, we’ve filed two cases on behalf of leading medical associations, physicians, and reproductive justice advocates, aiming to get rid of the FDA’s medically unnecessary restrictions on mifepristone. Our lawsuit prompted the FDA to remove some of those barriers and led to its finally permitting people to get the medication from a pharmacy, after consultation with their health care provider, rather than having to travel in person to an abortion clinic.

American Civil Liberties Union

What is Mifepristone and Why is it Essential to Abortion Access? | ACLU

Here are five facts to know about medication abortion, and why it’s a critical part of our fight for abortion access.

As this case develops, we’ll continue working with government officials and our partners to respond to any ruling that takes away a safe, effective, and common method for medication abortion.

At the same, we continue to fight the state bans. We have blocked bans in Arizona, Indiana, Iowa, Michigan, Ohio, and Utah. We are asking the state supreme courts in Kentucky, Georgia, and Florida to step in and block those states’ bans. And earlier this month, we filed a new case in West Virginia challenging provisions of the state’s total abortion ban.

We will not stop fighting until everyone can get the care they need, no matter who they are, where they live, or how much money they have.