How Flock surveillance goes beyond license plate readers to target immigrants

Over the course of the past year, immigration raids have soared across major U.S. cities. The Trump administration has deported more than 590,000 immigrants, according to an analysis by The Guardian, with artificial intelligence playing a big role. 

The federal immigration strategy is fueled by surveillance technology that not only aggregates public and private data, but also tracks social media and digital activity and gathers license plate information in order to target individuals and entire communities. 

During an American Community Media (ACoM) briefing held on Friday, panel experts examined the ongoing efforts in resisting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) tactics of invasive tracking technology in order to protect immigrant communities.

Jaya Padmanabhan, ACoM’s executive director, shared that roughly 120,000 Flock cameras are currently operating across the U.S, conducting about 20 billion scans per month. “We’ve already seen how this mass surveillance tool can be weaponized. ICE and CBP have repeatedly used Flock data to pursue immigrants without warrants,” she said.

Jonathan Paz, a union organizer, immigrant rights activist and a former employee of the mass surveillance technology company, Flock Safety, said that he started working there because at the time it wasn’t that popular to hate on Flock. “In my naive take, I actually believed that they were helping find missing people, which is kind of the dream that I was sold,” he said.

Flock Safety was founded in 2017 and since then has become one of the country's biggest makers of Automatic Licence Plate Readers (ALPRs), which are AI-powered device cameras. Paz shared that what triggered his departure from the company was the harsh realization that tech companies like Flock are surveilling everyday Americans. “They basically work around public and legal scrutiny,” he said.

During that time as part of the government affairs Flock Safety team, Paz relied heavily on promoting the automatic license plate readers in order to “seal the deal” with city officials. His pitch often highlighted Flock cameras as effective tools for locating missing children, recovering stolen vehicles and resolving hit-and-runs. 

City councils were promised quick resolutions to these issues within a day, though the truth of the company’s intentions are a different story. “These companies are meant to spy,” Paz said. 

He also revealed another harsh reality about Flock Safety. He said that the company’s primary focus was simply securing a spot in the city’s budget. Once Flock technology is funded, he explained, the local police departments become the driving force behind expanding the use of Flock’s ALPR cameras. 

Paz shared that the second Flock pitch was promoting the company’s safe guards, meaning they don’t sell the data. Although there are different parameter systems in place to protect individuals from their data being accessed, he said that companies like Flock are indirectly and directly violating state laws.

“In California, I don't have to tell you how many cities had out of state agencies having access to your systems to do immigration enforcement even though you had codified that into state law,” he said, and noted a complete lack of accountability from the major tech firms.

“These companies are almost immune to not only local legal scrutiny, they’re also immune to statewide scrutiny,” Paz said. “Federally speaking, the Fourth Amendment is mythical. The Fourth Amendment is basically dead.”

He emphasized that surveillance companies support the work of the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), ICE and Border Patrol. “These things are being weaponized and they’re being weaponized across the country,” he said.

Paz, having a deep understanding of Flock Safety technology, used that very same knowledge to help start a rapid response network in Massachusetts to help his community being targeted by immigration operations.

“My city was devastated by ICE activity… we had the heavy hand of the federal government in our own backyard because the director of ICE was from Massachusetts,” he said.

Paz also added that his home town was experiencing first-hand any technological experiments conducted by federal and local government agencies before they were exported to Los Angeles, Chicago and Texas. “We were a hunting ground,” he said.

Brian Hofer, executive director at Secure Justice, which protects privacy and civil rights by challenging government overreach and corporate complicity, shared that 10 years ago he created a sanctuary contracting ordinance that prohibited the award of contracts to vendors that provide data or analytics to ICE. 

That ordinance was in effect during the first Trump administration and helped chase the former dominant ALPR player, Vigilant Solutions, out of California. Unfortunately, Hofer said they were just replaced by Flock. Now, his work revolves around coalition building and litigation. “Flooding the courts and flooding the council chambers and public pressure is truly effective,” he said.

He also thinks that ALPR cameras are not the number one risk for immigrant communities although it's very difficult to prove that. He said that there are so many different surveillance technology tools and private data brokers that are being used.

Hofer shared that the entire surveillance tech ecosystem is much more than what they advertise it to be. “Part of the big problem right now is convincing elected officials that these are not systems in isolation. It's never just a license plate reader, cell bridge, stingray or a cell site simulator,” he said.

He emphasized that Flock cameras have become giant national ecosystems that not only track an individual throughout the country but also share data. Hofer explained that California enacted a bill 10 years ago and not one single entity has ever fully complied with SB 34. This bill prohibits the sharing of license plate reader data outside the state. 

He shared that he has been inspired by all the outpouring of opposition to the surveillance company across the country. He said that so far 184 contracts have been terminated in only the month of August. “In my 12 years, I've never seen anything like that, it is stunning,” he said.

Hofer explained that not only does Flock surveillance quickly identify folks, it also adds vehicle convoy tracking, which creates patterns that start to match individuals associations. 

“Its vehicle fingerprint technology is what's really given it a competitive advantage,” he said. He added that one of the reasons that they are able to locate immigrants so fast and with such precision is due to mobile devices sharing data.

“When FBI Director Kash Patel revealed that they were buying private data broker information to avoid getting a warrant, I got a fundraising email three hours later from one of the top elected officials here in California. I tried to introduce a bill to kill that in California and he helped kill it,” Hofer said. “California is not the most friendly place. We pretend we're a sanctuary; in my opinion, we are not a sanctuary state.”

He shared that at Secure Justice, they have a live tracker on their website, which individuals can pay attention to. It updates every single day due to the fast changes to Flock. “Off the top of my head, maybe 20% of the jurisdictions on our list have gone that way. They’ve just replaced one bad actor for maybe even a worse actor and this is the problem. There's only a few vendors to go through,” he said.

Finally, Hofer stressed that without the political determination to completely end mass surveillance practices, vendors and tools will simply continue to be swapped out.