The Flock is Always Watching
How a ubiquitous "community safety tool" became ICE's dystopian dream database
Author's Note: I live in a quiet county with a handful of traffic lights and about 15,000 residents. When I read that someone in my area had been erroneously charged with a felony based on Flock camera data, I thought to myself: “Surely it's only a matter of time before they use this on immigrants.” Turns out, it's been happening for years.
In Westchester County, New York—officially a “sanctuary” jurisdiction—police have quietly assembled a network of 480 license plate cameras. Recent records show that U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) accessed this local database of plate scans, vacuuming up detailed driving logs despite county laws meant to block cooperation with federal immigration raids. The same scenario is playing out across the United States: local governments are installing automated license plate readers (ALPRs) marketed as crime-fighting tools by firms like Flock Safety, only to have their data funnel into a sprawling mass-surveillance infrastructure that federal agencies can tap at will. Documents from Freedom of Information Act requests, watchdog reports, and insider emails reveal how this emerging surveillance dragnet transcends local promises – and why civil liberties advocates warn it’s becoming a serious threat to privacy, dissent, and immigrant communities.
Local Surveillance, Federal Reach
When a city or suburb buys an ALPR system from companies such as Flock Safety, Rekor, or Vigilant Solutions, they’re often sold on neighborhood safety and “smart policing.” The tech is simple, as easy to install as a bird feeder: all you need is a pole or other mounting surface. The solar panel and 5G connection make the system entirely self-reliant.
Flock Safety, a fast-growing startup founded in 2017, pitches its plate-reading cameras as a way to “eliminate nonviolent crime” and boasts installations in over 1,400 cities. The company’s business model, however, doesn’t stop at city limits. All Flock cameras feed into a centralized cloud database, which the company touts as a nationwide search tool for its law enforcement clients. “Use FlockOS’s local and national search network to find the suspect vehicle across state lines,” Flock tells police agencies – up to 1 billion plate reads per month, available for free to any customer. In essence, when a town installs Flock cameras, its residents’ movements become part of a giant, interlinked tracking network accessible far beyond that town’s borders.
This is by design. Flock partners with hundreds of police departments and even the FBI, integrating its system with law enforcement hotlists. Its cameras automatically compare every plate against state crime databases and the FBI’s warrants list, pinging police when a “wanted” car is spotted. The result is that local buyers unwittingly contribute to a national surveillance grid. As Flock’s CEO Garrett Langley admitted, if a customer agency chose to use the system for immigration enforcement, Flock would not stop them. “Yes, if it was legal in a state, we would not be in a position to stop them,” Langley said when asked whether Flock cameras could help deportation efforts, adding that “we give our customers the tools to decide and let them go from there.” In other words, once the equipment is in place, the data flows according to whoever has access – local intent and policies notwithstanding.
Flock is not alone. Vigilant Solutions (now owned by Motorola) pioneered this model with its nationwide ALPR database “LEARN.” In California, police in cities like Merced and Union City – despite sanctuary policies on paper – fed residents’ plate scans into Vigilant’s system, which ICE then queried to locate people for deportation. A 2019 ACLU investigation revealed that over 9,000 ICE officers have accounts on Vigilant’s platform, giving them access to more than 5 billion license plate scans amassed from private businesses (toll roads, parking lots, repo trucks) and an additional 1.5 billion records from law enforcement agencies. At least 80 local police departments across a dozen states had signed data-sharing agreements funneling plate reads to ICE – in many cases without telling the public, and even in direct violation of local privacy laws or “sanctuary” promises.
Much of this sharing happens through quiet backdoor channels. For example, Southern California’s Orange County Intelligence Assessment Center (a regional fusion center) enabled an ICE agent to request plate data that a private mall operator had collected on shoppers. The mall’s owner had insisted it never shared data with ICE – yet an internal email showed an ICE Homeland Security Investigations specialist simply asked a local detective to run a plate, bypassing any official policy. Fusion centers, originally created for post-9/11 counterterrorism, have become ideal conduits for ICE and DHS to tap “protected” local data. A recent report by the Surveillance Technology Oversight Project details how ICE leans on these hubs to get everything from police license plate lookups to driver’s photos, even from departments in sanctuary jurisdictions. Because the data request comes through a multi-agency fusion center rather than a direct ICE login to a local camera system, it often skirts public notice and accountability. In practice, an ICE officer can piggyback on a local cop’s access and track a car through any town, sanctuary laws be damned.
The case of Westchester County exposed this contradiction starkly. Westchester’s county executive had reassured immigrant residents that county police wouldn’t aid ICE. Yet emails obtained by journalists showed that ICE was actively accessing Westchester’s vast plate reader database in 2021-2022. The revelation forced local mayors to scramble and insist they weren’t “cooperating” with ICE. Still, it appears ICE didn’t need formal cooperation – the data was already available via the third-party vendor (Rekor) and inter-agency networks. “Westchester can be a sanctuary county or a surveillance state. It can’t be both,” argued Albert Fox Cahn of STOP. From New York to California, this is the new reality: the lines drawn by local pro-privacy policies are easily erased by the spread of ALPR technology and the hunger of federal agencies to access it.
From License Plates to Life Profiles
A single license plate scan – a timestamped dot on a map – might seem innocuous. But aggregate millions of them, and you have a detailed mosaic of someone’s life. Trips to the mosque every Friday? A stop at an immigration law office? Regular overnight visits to a certain house? ALPR data can reveal it all. And federal authorities aren’t just collecting these plate scans in isolation; they’re combining them with other surveillance streams to build comprehensive dossiers on Americans.
For ICE, the key tool is a system called Investigative Case Management (ICM) – essentially a mega-database that Palantir Technologies built to power ICE’s investigations. A recent look inside ICM showed it can filter people by hundreds of categories, from immigration status and associates to phone numbers – even “license plate reader data” is a searchable field. In fact, Palantir’s $95 million contract to bolster ICM specifically notes integration of real-time location feeds, including plate-reader hits. This allows an ICE agent to, say, set up an alert for a particular car or person: if a camera anywhere in the network spots a plate linked to their target, it can trigger a notification in Palantir’s system. Once flagged, that plate data can be cross-referenced with “hundreds of tables” of other data on that individual – from past border crossings to employment, family connections, and social media posts.
It’s not only ICE. Police departments using Palantir or similar “fusion” software can do the same. The Los Angeles Police Department, for one, spent years feeding all ALPR captures in the region into Palantir Gotham, enabling officers to pull up every location a vehicle has been seen in Greater LA at the click of a button. One email showed LAPD and LA County deputies were running 200-300 license plate searches a day through Palantir, treating it as routine practice. With such tools, a plate number becomes a pivot point to find where you sleep, work, worship, and who else frequents those places. As one surveillance expert noted, even small-town police with access to a cloud ALPR system can “suddenly afford to conduct surveillance at a massive scale”.
Private data brokers amplify this power further. Thomson Reuters’s widely-used “CLEAR” platform merges government and commercial data into an “ever-evolving, 360-degree view of U.S. residents’ lives”. According to The New York Times Magazine, CLEAR pulls in credit bureau records, utility bills, cell phone subscriber info – even scraping social media posts and chat rooms. Tellingly, CLEAR also integrates Vigilant Solutions’ license plate reader feeds. This means an ICE agent using CLEAR can trace five years’ worth of a car’s movements while simultaneously reviewing the owner’s address history, business licenses, relatives, and Facebook photos. Face recognition systems add another layer: images from traffic cameras or toll gantries can be matched to driver’s license databases or mugshots. DHS and FBI have deployed face-recognition in cities and airports, and through fusion centers, ICE can query those as well when building a target profile.
The convergence of these technologies raises a chilling prospect: a government analyst could start with a single data point – a license plate spotted near a protest, for instance – and rapidly pull in that car owner’s identity, address, associations (who else was at the protest, identified via plate or face data), and online activities. In an era when dissent is increasingly surveilled, such capabilities make it dangerously easy to map out activist networks or minority communities. What began as a promise to catch car thieves and criminals has evolved into an all-seeing web, where local traffic cameras feed a far larger intelligence machine.
Communities Pushing Back – and Fighting Bias
As ALPRs spread, so do stories of overreach and harm. For every claim that these cameras help solve crimes, there’s a headline about an innocent driver terrorized after being misidentified by a license plate reader. Brittney Gilliam’s family in Aurora, Colorado learned this in 2020 when police ordered the mother and her four young girls out of their car at gunpoint over a mistaken stolen car hit; the ALPR had conflated her SUV’s plate with a motorcycle from another state. Years earlier in San Francisco, Denise Green, a 47-year-old city worker, was forced to kneel on the roadside at gunpoint after an ALPR misread a “3” as a “7” and flagged her Lexus as stolen. She sued the SFPD, and her case became an early warning of how a single false read can cascade into a dangerous police encounter. Such errors are not rare: an ALPR industry study found cameras misread 1 in 10 plates just on state identification alone (to say nothing of misreading characters). The ACLU and EFF have documented dozens of wrongful stops and detentions caused by bad plate data – from an innocent man in Illinois dragged from his vehicle, to a New Mexico mother and 12-year-old detained at gunpoint over a one-digit error.
Beyond the immediate harms, the broader civil liberty concerns are galvanizing opposition. Privacy advocates say pervasive plate tracking can “chill” free association and protest. If police can trace every car at a political demonstration or at a religious gathering, people may fear exercising their rights. In one striking case, an internal Boston police bulletin explicitly instructed officers to use ALPRs to catalog all cars parked near certain mosques during Friday prayers (part of a post-9/11 initiative to monitor Muslim Americans). Such targeting has raised alarms that ALPR databases could be misused to monitor not just immigrants or criminals, but political opponents, journalists, or ordinary citizens engaged in lawful activities.
These fears are no longer hypothetical, and communities are starting to push back in force. Denver, Colorado recently made national news when its City Council voted unanimously to reject a $555,000 extension with Flock Safety, after heated public debate over privacy. “This is a form of mass surveillance technology,” said Councilwoman Sarah Parady, arguing that the risk to civil liberties outweighed any crime-solving benefits. Parady and her colleagues were disturbed to learn that FBI agents had direct access to Denver’s ALPR database (which stores plate hits for 30 days) – raising the specter that ICE could get to it via the FBI, despite Denver’s sanctuary status. Denver’s police insisted they “would not share data with ICE for immigration purposes,” but for many residents, that promise rang hollow given how easily federal agencies can share intelligence. Ultimately, public outcry carried the day in Denver, and the city’s network of 100+ Flock cameras will come down, at least for now.
Denver is part of a small but growing trend. From Golden, CO to Oakland, CA, citizens and civil rights groups are demanding transparency and limits on plate readers, or rejecting them outright. In Paradise Hills, a Denver suburb, a bitter fight over Flock cameras in an HOA subdivision became so intense it garnered coverage in The Washington Post, illustrating the grassroots resistance to surveillance in even quiet neighborhoods. In Westchester’s Scarsdale village, outrage erupted this year when residents learned the town had quietly signed a contract with Flock without public input. The backlash forced the mayor to address the issue: he pledged that any unauthorized federal access “would violate our agreement and prompt termination” of the program. It’s unclear how the town would actually prevent agencies like ICE from exploiting the data, but the episode shows local politicians feeling the heat. Likewise, Norfolk, Virginia residents filed a lawsuit in October alleging the city’s 172 new Flock cameras amount to an unconstitutional, warrantless dragnet on their daily drives. The suit quotes Norfolk’s own police chief, who unabashedly described the goal as a “curtain of technology” covering the city, making it “difficult to drive anywhere… without running into a camera.” For the plaintiffs fenced in by those cameras, that “curtain” feels like a violation of basic freedoms.
Civil liberties organizations are also pressing lawmakers for action. The Electronic Frontier Foundation and ACLU have called for strict limits on ALPR data sharing and retention, warning that mass location tracking can “paint a literal roadmap of people’s private lives” vulnerable to abuse. Some states have responded: California enacted a law requiring agencies to implement usage and privacy policies for ALPRs and audited several departments in 2020, finding widespread non-compliance and sharing beyond what the law allowed. New York City lawmakers introduced a bill in 2023 to ban the sale of resident movement data to entities like ICE. And after the Westchester revelations, advocates in New York are pushing for a statewide Sanctuary Data law to close the loopholes that let ICE exploit local systems.
The Crossroads of Convenience and Liberty
America now faces a choice: Will our neighborhoods become nodes in an always-on surveillance network, or will we rein it in? ALPR technology has undoubted investigative value – police have solved homicides, recovered stolen cars, and even rescued kidnapped children thanks to plate readers. But that utility comes at a steep price if the same systems enable unchecked government monitoring of the populace. “It is profoundly and painfully ironic,” Fox Cahn observed, “that American highways went from the symbol of freedom and the liberty of the open road to [a metaphor for creeping surveillance and police control].” The warnings from history are loud: powers built to target one group (undocumented immigrants, for example) invariably spread to others. What starts as a crime-fighting tool can quickly become a dragnet for everyone, especially when powered by profit-driven tech firms eager to expand their data pools.
For now, the likes of Flock Safety are forging ahead with ambitious growth plans – often with minimal oversight. Flock’s goal is to put cameras in “every single city in America,” and it has $300 million in venture funding to do it. The company markets itself as a champion of community safety, coining feel-good slogans and partnering with neighborhood groups. But as we’ve seen, behind that friendly pitch is a system that treats every car as fair game for tracking, and that hands over the keys to a kingdom of data to any law enforcement agency that asks. The burden then falls on local officials and citizens to ask: Where will this data go? Who will wield it? If those questions don’t get answered upfront, they’ll be answered later in ways that may be irreversible.
In the end, confronting this mass surveillance infrastructure will require sustained public pressure and stronger legal guardrails. It may mean saying no to certain technologies, or at least demanding that sanctuary truly means sanctuary – that data collected for local public safety stays local and out of the hands of immigration crackdowns. It will certainly mean rejecting the false trade-off that more cameras automatically equal more safety. As communities like Denver and others have shown, it’s possible to draw a line and insist that the right to privacy and the freedom to go about one’s life without constant monitoring remain fundamental American values. The alternative is a future where stepping into your car feels like entering a surveillance pod – and where an automated network of unblinking eyes follows you from home, to work, to church, to protest, and back again. The technology is here; the fight over it is now. The outcome will shape the character of American freedom in the years to come.
Sources: This investigation drew on public records and reports including an ACLU of Northern California FOIA lawsuit revealing ICE’s access to Vigilant Solutions’ ALPR database, a Surveillance Technology Oversight Project study on ICE’s use of fusion centers, a 2022 ACLU white paper on Flock Safety’s surveillance model, the Westchester County FOIL email cache reported by The Guardian, Denver City Council proceedings and local media, and numerous examples documented by EFF, The Intercept, and others on ALPR misuse and community pushback.