419
Flock, maker of controversial license plate readers, starts to give campaign cash to local politicians
(chicago.suntimes.com)
this post was submitted on 09 Nov 2026
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Right now Flock Safety is a pariah in the US like AIPAC. Outing these transactions would benefit both rival campaigns and corruption-watch nonprofits.
Mass surveillance should be regarded as a crime agains the public, and a violation of protections by the fourth amendment to the Constitution of the United States.
Maybe such politicians should be pushed to publicly endorse making ALPR network database hits inadmissable in court. Get a public no.
Already we're seeing police precincts warning officers to not admit they searched ALPR databases but to make another excuse. We're already seeing the same shift to parallel reconstruction that we did with IMSI spoofer usage.
In a better world, ALPR database searches should only be allowed with a narrowly-constrained judicial warrant.
But IRL, law enforcement nationwide is notorious for abusing forensic tools to secure probable cause or even false convictions. So they shouldn't be trusted with ALPRs at all.