This is horrible.
--Kim
In much of America, a private company knows where you drive. It knows when you leave the house, which roads you take, what time you come home -- logging your car's movements through a network of AI cameras that scan some 20 billion license plates a month, in more than 6,000 communities across the country, and store them in a database police can search without a warrant. It is the kind of mass surveillance Americans tend to associate with authoritarian states like China -- yet it has been built here, in only about seven years, by a private company, with little public debate and almost no oversight. And it has become, in the hands of the wrong people, a nearly perfect tool for stalking women.
For months, Marci Bakely could not understand how her ex-boyfriend always seemed to know where she was. He would text her about a doctor's appointment, a date, a run to the grocery store -- sometimes within minutes -- though he lived and worked fifteen miles away. The 50-year-old Air Force veteran installed three cameras around her home to see if he was staking out her cul-de-sac. She bought a hidden-camera detector and waved it down every wall. Three times, she drove her car to a mechanic and asked him to scan it for trackers.
The answer, when it came, was worse than a tracker: her ex was a police chief, and he was watching her through Flock -- the private company whose license-plate cameras now blanket thousands of American communities. By the time she knew what was happening, Michael Steffman had searched her license plate, and her teenage daughter's, roughly 600 times. He was arrested in November on charges of stalking, harassment, and misusing the license-plate system; in April, before he could stand trial, he was found dead at his home, in what officials said was a suicide.
Bakely's case is not an outlier. A new Washington Post investigation has identified at least 50 law-enforcement officers charged or accused of misusing license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes. In 26 of those cases, investigators and prosecutors said the officers used the technology to spy on their wives, their girlfriends, their exes, their exes' new partners, or women they wanted to meet. Flock's system was involved in most of them, and it made the surveillance nearly effortless: no warrant, no case number, just a plate number typed into a search bar and, moments later, a map is generated of where someone had been.
The 50 documented cases are almost certainly a fraction of the real number, because the system is built in a way that keeps its own misuse hidden. Search logs are held by individual police departments, and only some have ever been released through public-records requests, so most people have no way of knowing whether their car has been tracked. When an advocacy group in Joplin, Missouri, obtained its local logs, it found that 85% of searches were justified with a single word -- "suspicious," "drugs" -- and that fewer than 3% were tied to a criminal case.
The safeguards that might catch abuse, like requiring a case number or auditing officers' searches, are optional, and most departments leave them switched off. Many logs are never reviewed at all. The women who do find out tend to learn by accident -- a call from an internal-affairs investigator, or a search of their own plate through a website called Have I Been Flocked.
The records tell the same story in city after city: a man with a badge using a national surveillance system to trace the movements of a woman trying to get away from him. In Wisconsin, an officer allegedly used Flock to check whether his ex-girlfriend had gone to an abortion clinic, then contacted the clinic to try to obtain her medical records and began calling her as many as nineteen times a day. In Texas, an officer ran a woman's plate through more than eighty thousand cameras across the country to track her down after she had an abortion.
In Kansas, a police lieutenant tracked his ex-wife to the day-care center where she took their children -- a location she had deliberately kept from him. In Florida, an officer video-called his girlfriend to show her footage of herself driving, then came to her apartment, grabbed her, and reminded her that he carried a gun. When she threatened to call the police, he told her, "The police are already here."
That is the particular terror of it: the man doing the stalking is often the institution a woman would call for help. "Where do you go as a victim if you're being abused?" said Adam Dodge, founder of the cyber-safety group EndTAB. "You go to law enforcement, right?"
Eva Galperin, who directs cybersecurity at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, described what the tool gives an abuser. "The goal of the abuser is to make themselves seem omniscient and omnipotent," she said. "You don't have to be watching your victim all the time. They just have to believe that at any moment you could be." The women describe living inside exactly that fear -- watched, unable to prove it, uncertain which cameras were his eyes. Some stopped leaving the house. Some began borrowing their relatives' cars.
The ones who reported it have often been waved off. Bakely filed for a restraining order against Steffman, and a judge denied it, ruling that his conduct was "concerning" but that she could not prove ongoing stalking. In Pennsylvania, Alexandria Griffith warned her local police department and the district attorney's office that her officer husband was tracking and threatening her, and says both dismissed her. Days later, she says, he came to her parents' home with a gun and shoved her and her four-year-old son. "A lot of people knew that all of this was happening," she said, "and they kind of just brushed me off."
Where accountability came at all, it came unevenly: officers kept their access after being warned, and in some states the misuse is not even a crime. In Idaho, a sheriff who searched for his wife's car several times a day faced no charges, because misusing a license-plate reader there is not, on its own, illegal.
The company that built the network has decided this is not its concern. In barely seven years, Flock has grown from a single camera its founder rigged out of an Android phone in a rainproof box into a mass-surveillance network valued at over seven billion dollars -- one most Americans have never heard of, backed by some of Silicon Valley's most powerful investors. Accountability to the millions of Americans whose movements it records appears to weigh far less on the company than its own growth. In the case of the documented abuse of its system for stalking, Flock has largely disowned the problem.
"We're not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions," its chief executive, Garrett Langley, told the Post. Asked whether the company should do more to restrict how officers use the tool, he has been plainer: "I don't think it's our job to police the police." One of Flock's investors, the venture capitalist David Ulevitch, called the more than forty documented misuse cases "truly a nonissue."
A company that has assembled one of the most detailed records of Americans' movements ever created has looked at the women its product helps stalk and seen a cost worth absorbing.
Nor is the company's response to criticism merely passive. A confidential guide Flock distributes to police departments, obtained by the technology outlet 404 Media, coaches agencies on how to defuse public opposition before it can form -- advising officers to brief city officials privately, before residents ever reach a public comment period, and to "own the narrative before someone else does."
On the specific charge that its cameras enable mass surveillance, the guide counsels police not to bother denying it -- "you're not going to convince opponents that it's not," it says -- but to change the subject to public safety. The same company that calls the abuse of its system a matter for others to police has written a playbook for steering communities past the scrutiny that might expose it.
That scrutiny is coming anyway. Between the summer of 2021 and this spring, 82 Flock contracts were canceled across 28 states, 39 of them in the first five months of this year alone. The ACLU has mounted a national campaign it calls "Get the Flock Out"; in Harrisonburg, Virginia, the city council voted to bag the cameras in trash until they could be removed; in a small Texas town, residents simply sawed one down.
Still the network grows, because growth is the whole design -- every new camera makes the system more powerful, more valuable, and harder to escape. For the women already inside it, none of this was ever abstract. Bakely, who learned that the man tracking her every move ran the police force she might otherwise have called, put the problem simply: "Who do you turn the chief of police in to?"
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No one should be able to track a woman's every movement without consequence -- and ordinary citizens shouldn't have their movements tracked and recorded by a private, unaccountable company. Here's how to protect yourself and push back. Here's how to protect yourself and push back.
--> To read the Washington Post investigation that documented how police officers across the country have misused license-plate readers to stalk women, visit https://wapo.st/4xGdGUj
--> Most communities adopted these cameras with little public debate, and local officials have the power to change that. Contact your city council or county board and ask whether your community contracts with Flock or another license-plate-reader company; whether officers must log a criminal case number for every search; and whether anyone audits those searches. Ask them to require warrants, mandate audits, or end the contract.
--> The ACLU's "Get the Flock Out" campaign helps residents find out whether their community uses these cameras and push for change, and includes a step-by-step guide for fighting Flock contracts and model policies for local officials at https://www.aclu.org/campaigns-initiatives/get-the-flock-out
--> From August 16 to 22, the grassroots project DeFlock is coordinating a National Week of Action Against license-plate readers -- town halls, community meetings, and events in cities across the country, with an organizing toolkit for anyone who wants to take part. Find events and resources at https://www.noalprs.com, and see whether cameras have been mapped in your area at https://deflock.me
--> To find out whether your own license plate has been searched in Flock's system, you can look it up at https://haveibeenflocked.com
--> For more on how license-plate readers and other street-level surveillance work -- and how communities are responding -- see the Electronic Frontier Foundation's Street-Level Surveillance project at https://www.eff.org/issues/street-level-surveillance
--> If you or someone you know is being stalked or is experiencing domestic violence, the National Domestic Violence Hotline offers free, confidential support 24 hours a day at 1-800-799-7233, or text "START" to 88788. For help specifically with technology-enabled abuse -- tracking, surveillance, and stalking through devices or data -- the Safety Net project at the National Network to End Domestic Violence offers survivor resources at https://www.techsafety.org
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- For a deeply reported look at how private data companies and government agencies have quietly built an American surveillance state -- the larger system that networks like Flock's are part of -- we recommend "Means of Control: How the Hidden Alliance of Tech and Government Is Creating a New American Surveillance State" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9780593443224 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4z6wXjd (Amazon)
- For a detailed account of how private companies came to harvest and profit from the details of our lives, we recommend "The Age of Surveillance Capitalism" at https://bookshop.org/a/8011/9781541758001 (Bookshop) and https://amzn.to/4xnIOaQ (Amazon)
- For a potentially life-saving book for older teens and adults about the early warning signs of abusive relationships, myths about abusive personalities, and how to get help, we highly recommend "Why Does He Do That?: Inside the Minds of Angry and Controlling Men" at https://www.amightygirl.com/why-does-he-do-that
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- For more on Flock's strategy for managing public opposition to its cameras, see Tech Times at https://www.techtimes.com/.../flock-safety-coaches-police...
- To read more about the Texas officer who searched tens of thousands of cameras to track a woman after she had an abortion, see the Electronic Frontier Foundation at https://www.eff.org/.../she-got-abortion-so-texas-cop...
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