Denver dumps Flock, awards contract to Axon
9news.com
9news.com
Axon interfered heavily with that process and -- after the legislative workgroup had well concluded and just a couple of hours before the Senate committee was to vote on it -- managed to neuter one of the key protections in the bill.
Axon is not "better" than Flock, they are just slightly less transparent about some aspects and slightly less radioactive.
Community groups that have formed and activated against Flock should continue to harass local governments that immediately switch to Axon as a replacement.
You could say similar things about Palantir - that it’s just a figurehead and that the NSA / TIA has similar capabilities but it’s still important to use the figurehead as an example to others.
But yes in general I think it’s important to not let this stop here. Denver needs to be pressured to remove the cameras entirely. This is a defensive move on Denver’s part and it shows they’re on their back foot.
Also, your Reps do read your correspondence, and there's a critical moment coming up in this bill.
Drop me a line at contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'll reply with a Signal link and we can talk more.
If you don't mind, what's the current situation with Flock in Eugene? Last I heard was that EPD was ending their relationship but it wasn't clear if the cameras were actually going to be removed. I believe Springfield has already gotten rid of theirs, and Florence voted to keep them.
(By the way, thank you, you guys are doing invaluable work)
Funnily enough, Portland (apart from big box parking lots) seems to be empty of those. I remember them trying to push ShotSpotter and being slapped down by the city's progressive wing.
I worked most closely with Senator Floyd Prozanski. He's my local senator, and was in many ways an ideal fit for this. After we successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene, Springfield, and Lane County, he reached out to form a legislative workgroup. Over a few months of effort, we developed SB1516: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2026R1/Measures/Overv...
Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of opinions on ALPRs, this is either a sort of okay bill or a pretty terrible bill.
-14 materialized, Prozanski called for a vote on -12, Senator Braodman voted with Republicans against -12, and then they unanimously voted in -14: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2026R1/Downloads/Prop...
The sole difference between the two is that -14 removes the following language: "'End-to-end encryption’ means a method of data encryption that ensures only the law enforcement agency that owns the captured license plate data possesses the capability to decrypt, access or grant access to the captured license plate data."
This was just the latest move in a long, long series of behind-the-scenes work by Axon to undermine the entire bill throughout its development.
There's a lot more I'm eager to say about that process, but we have some work to do before it all can be made public.
This is why I'm increasingly jaded with 'get involved with your local legislative process!' proponents. If you don't have the ability to lobby around the clock and make campaign or in-kind political donations (and know how to communicate your willingness to do that), then you're at a massive disadvantage. As well, the process itself is highly corruptible, eg altering the text of a bill just before a scheduled vote.
As a general matter, I'm increasingly disgusted with the prevalence of tactics like holding votes in the dead of night or in closed sessions. Politicians engage in a lot of tricks to evade scrutiny from their constituents, relying on the fact that once a piece of legislation is passed people might be angry but the politician can often get away with saying 'there was no other choice, we have to work within the process' or some similar empty truism.
But also, having just been through this process (for my first time!): however terrible you think the political process is, it's worse.
I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.
They must be making huge profits, assuming every bodycam needs some kind of recurring revenue (for evidence.com, maintenance, replacements). BUT as far as I can tell, they are also taking the judicial requirements very seriously. Unlike Flock, I haven't heard anything about AXON providing tools to circumvent the 4th amendment. In fact, AXON makes tools that make it easier to comply with the law. For example, record requests for bodycam videos are (again, afaik) easy to satisfy with their tech.
I don't know what ownership they have of videos stored on their services. Can they use it for LLM training? can they sell anonymized data? do they? no idea, but trust in Flock is at about a 0 out of 10.
Freedom of Information requests to axon seem to be given our somewhat freely given how large the bodycam genre on Youtube is.
How about Denver just doesn't surveil its citizens, at all?
I have to guess that the folks clamoring to put computer vision "back in the bag" are somewhere on the margins, and resemble straw more than steel.
Alot of these tech vendors have been a way to launder data gathering to avoid neeidng to get warrants
I'm not saying ALPRs don't pose new privacy problems and, in the long term, depending on how they're used, even constitutional problems. But clearly the Anti-Pinkerton Act doesn't get you anywhere here.
They do if it's done to the point where you can track individuals around the city.
https://www.ca4.uscourts.gov/opinions/201495A.P.pdf
> The AIR program uses aerial photography to track movements related to serious crimes. Multiple planes fly distinct orbits above Baltimore, equipped with PSS’s camera technology known as the “Hawkeye Wide Area Imaging System.” The cameras capture roughly 32 square miles per image per second. The planes fly at least 40 hours a week, obtaining an estimated twelve hours of coverage of around 90% of the city each day, 5 weather permitting. The PSA limits collection to daylight hours and limits the photographic resolution to one pixel per person or vehicle, though neither restriction is required by the technology. In other words, any single AIR image—captured once per second—includes around 32 square miles of Baltimore and can be magnified to a point where people and cars are individually visible, but only as blurred dots or blobs.
> On the merits, because the AIR program enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements, we hold that accessing its data is a search, and its warrantless operation violates the Fourth Amendment
Anyways, I'm not that interested in the broader long-term constitutional debate. I'm just interested in shutting down the glib Anti-Pinkerton cite.
And explicity notes that it's the relative scarcity of them that matters.
> Decades later, in United States v. Jones, 565 U.S. 400 (2012), location-tracking technology crossed the line from merely augmenting to impermissibly enhancing. There, police used a GPS-tracking device to remotely monitor and record a vehicle’s movements over 28 days. Id. at 402–04. Although the case was ultimately decided on trespass principles, five Justices agreed that “longer term GPS monitoring . . . impinges on expectations of privacy.” See id. at 430 (Alito, J., concurring); id. at 415 (Sotomayor, J., concurring). Based on “[t]raditional surveillance” capacity “[i]n the precomputer age,” the Justices reasoned that “society’s expectation” was that police would not “secretly monitor and catalogue every single movement of an individual’s car for a very long period.”
> Thus, Carpenter solidified the line between short-term tracking of public movements—akin to what law enforcement could do “[p]rior to the digital age”—and prolonged tracking that can reveal intimate details through habits and patterns.
Put enough of them up, and the software to track between them, and you're in "enables police to deduce from the whole of individuals’ movements" territory.
I'll tell you what's not going to happen, with certainty: we're not going to get to a point with ALPRs where it becomes so abusive that the Supreme Court decides municipalities can't track cars at all.
Sure. But they may get restricted somewhat, as they are if they want to demolish my house without my consent.
Though at some point, even SCOTUS just does whatever feels right, regardless of what the law says. In Carpenter, SCOTUS ruled 5-4 that your cellular company voluntarily handing over historical cell data also counts as a government search. An appellate court has held that if photography is extensive enough, it becomes a search. SCOTUS has held before that uncommon photographic equipment can constitute a search. That logic honestly doesn't really make sense, but it is what it is now. I wouldn't be surprised that the courts rule against it, but that's not what the law really says.
https://courthousenews.com/judge-holds-norfolks-license-plat...
> "Because rapid technological advances, such as the rise of artificial intelligence, make it impossible to predict how police surveillance will evolve, the Fourth Amendment analysis must remain nimble even as it remains grounded in founding-era traditions," the George W. Bush appointee wrote in a 51-page opinion. "Plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that defendants' ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person's movements."
> Davis drew distinctions from two significant precedents in determining that the pair's Fourth Amendment challenge lacked merit. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the government violates the Fourth Amendment when it accesses a suspect's historical cell site location information without a warrant. The Fourth Circuit ruled in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department that the department's surveillance program, which captured and stored aerial images of nearly the entire city, violated the Fourth Amendment.
> Davis ruled that, unlike in cases where the government tracked people's movements through cellphone data and aerial photos, the collection of Flock data does not capture enough information to catalogue citizens' movements in their entirety. Davis reasoned that the 176 cameras, located in 75 clusters across the city, do not constitute a search.
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/axon-plans-to-sever-apis-wi...
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Many states do not consider a trailer hitch ball as "obstructing" the license plate...
...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung directly across my identifier, entirely obscuring the plate (but not "obstructing," to letter of poorly-written laws e.g. Tennessee's).
Been rolling with it for months and nobody cares. Now I'm in Flock's database as the white Camry with no visible identifier (no bumper stickers nor tag visible).
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First time you get cited for "obstructing license plate," in Tennessee, is a $10.00 fine. Second is $20.00. This state also doesn't require plates for trailers, so after my second citation I'll just start hauling my 2ft long canoe trailer everywhere (which conveniently covers license plate).
i.e: yes, my vehicle is now "white car, obscurred plate" — but if Officer Joe Blow is searching for my specific license plate... he'd have to try harder (e.g. I have intentionally sped past a traffic camera to see if I get the ticket — have not, to date [0]).
Obviously if you make yourself too big a target (i.e. manhunt level searching) this won't work. See <https://xkcd.com/1105/>. I roll around GTA-one-star (or less), so this is helpful.
[0] My state has entirely banned the enforcability of photo citations (except passing school bus == good), but a private company still sends out speeding notices — my obfuscation bare minimum saves somebody the postage fees.