Take action 💪

Non-Flock ALPRs

Most of the law enforcement jurisdictions around Dane County who have cancelled Flock contracts due to public outcry are trying to get different cameras from supposedly "less evil" corporations like Axon and Motorola.

Talking points for ALPRs 🤨

• Flock Safety is a terrible company, but we need to be clear: we simply do not want unchecked surveillance in our community. 🏘️
• Flock isn't the problem, Flock is just the bellwether of the future of this technology. Any company that claims to be different has simply not yet scaled to the point where such abuses of data and privacy are profitable enough to risk public backlash.
• ALPRs are a system begging to be abused, and they are being paid for by venture capital and taxpayer dollars.
• Any company with the same level of success Flock has enjoyed will tend towards oversharing between jurisdictions and away from civilian control, leading to abuses.
• If a future vendor is better about media management and information controls than Flock, they will likely be able to get away with much of the same abuses Flock did.
• If we create surveillance and data, what stops the feds from compelling us to hand it over in service of whatever fucked oppression they pull next?
• Remember, DHS is constantly doing creepy surveillance shit like tracking protestors and creepy ad-tech purchases
• The federal government is kind of at war with many of its citizens these days
• Let's not fund the systems that will help them do the white nationalist reich they're trying to pull
• Fundamentally, this technology is an end-run around the 4th Amendment by privatizing state surveillance; it makes us vulnerable to private ALPR vendors, bad actors inside law enforcement, as well as any future regime that may decide to abuse this technology in whatever ways they wish

Talking points for Dane County 💃

• The county's new ALPR resolution asks the Sheriff to request a new contract for ALPR services with "protections" built into the contract language, but they're just a justification to support the same technology gap Flock previously filled.
• It's important to make people aware of these false "protections" and undermine them early, because many people who oppose Flock may be swayed if they hear from an authority that it "won't be like Flock."
• The resolution includes an "audit" that does not appear to be an ongoing audit requirement (only initially on setup of the system).
• We wouldn't have any actual authority over the company or way to verify they're doing what they say they're doing.
• The only tool we'd have is to cancel the contract for whatever reason in the future.

Evergreen actions 🌲

• Connect on one of our lists and get organized with folks fighting mass surveillance
• Tell your friends and start letting people know these cameras even exist - print some zines!
• Contact your local elected folks
• Educate yourself and read some articles about mass surveillance, locally and beyond, and find out what others have been doing to fight all this

Even more ideas 💡

• Contact your local police force that's using Flock or other networked cameras and ask them what their policy will be when those cameras are inevitably used by ICE to terrorize our community - and then research what happened in the Twin Cities when people in power had made promises and ICE came in force. [Spoiler alert: promises always get broken in favor of capital and white supremacy. Wonder why that is?]
• More importantly, contact the people who hold the purse strings for that force, and convince them to cancel the Flock contracts, as Verona and the Dane County Board have; the next hard part is getting them to not reinvest in identically problematic surveillance.
• Support local Civilian Control Over Police Surveillance (CCOPS) ordinances and laws
• Support the state constitutional amendment protecting right to privacy
• Support the national ICE Out of Our Faces Act