The United States is having something of a national referendum on mass surveillance as of late. Embodied most infamously by video surveillance company Flock Safety, Americans from all walks of life are waging war against the proliferation of the company’s automatic license plate readers (ALPR), which the ACLU warns now number in the tens of thousands.

Plenty of communities are organizing campaigns to out-muscle municipal leaders or their cheerleaders on the local police force, and by-and-large, they’re working. Whether in rural towns or sprawling cities, activists who can mobilize citizens to flood council meetings and hold picket signs are finding success. Perhaps most prominently, the Los Angeles Police Department recently allowed its three-year contract with Flock to expire, citing democratic pushback as a significant pressure point.

There’s also another, less-legal side to the anti-Flock sentiment: a rising tide of vandalism. Not content to wait for local officials to strike down ALPR contracts, concerned citizens are taking matters into their own hands by disabling or cutting down Flock camera towers wherever they’re found. But what started as a collection of separate individuals is now rising to the level of a viral phenomenon, as privacy-minded Redditors take to the web to celebrate those who are fighting back with an outpouring of ironic memes and hype reels.

Ground zero for this community appears to be the subreddit r/FlockSurveillance. The forum hosts some 422,000 “activists,” who flood the channel with over 11,000 contributions per week.

Some of the top posts on the subreddit are memes celebrating Flock vandalism: there are crude Photoshop jobs re-imagining covers of the Berenstain Bears as anti-Flock activists, hand-drawn signs encouraging copper thieves to cash in on Flock innards, and an ALPR-themed redesign of the Gadsden flag, to name a few.

Those who’ve been caught and charged with vandalizing ALPRs become digital folk heroes on the subreddit. When news broke that US Air Force engineer Jeffrey Sovern had been charged in connection to the destruction of 13 Flock devices, redditors flooded the post with praise, sharing links to his legal defense fund and encouraging others to donate. (Sovern’s GoFundMe now stands at over $40,000, compared to around $15,440 in early July.)

“I donated to him because those charges are bulls***,” one redditor replied.

In addition to memes, the subreddit has become a destination for serious discussion around ALPRs and surveillance in general. One developer used the forum as a launch pad for their app FlockHopper, a navigation app that helps travelers avoid ALRPs. Others use it to share important developments relevant to the anti-Flock crowd, to get advice on Freedom of Information Act requests, and to dispel misinformation.

“As entertaining a trend as it is, will a few Redditors knocking a few poles over really make a difference?” one redditor asked the group.

“Even a single grain of rice can tip the scales,” a user replied.

More on Flock: Man Trapped in Dystopian Nightmare Thanks to AI Surveillance Cameras Flagging His Every Move

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Rarely has the Los Angeles Police Department found a police toy it doesn’t love. The third-largest police force in the US has major Palantir contracts in place, uses sketchy apps to track minority communities, and routinely sends drones to spy on peaceful protestors.

So when the LAPD ends a contract with a surveillance company because it thinks the technology is too dangerous, you know there’s a problem.

Over the weekend, the police department announced it was abandoning its contract with Flock Safety, the controversial company blanketing the United States in AI-integrated license plate cameras (ALPRs). Though its three-year contract with Flock is just about up, the LAPD says it won’t renew the partnership, citing residents’ concerns over privacy and civil rights, ABC reported.

“This contract is not being renewed because of serious concerns around civil liberties and civil rights issues, particularly around privacy and the data that is being collected from these cameras,” LAPD’s chief information officer Dean Gialamas told ABC in a statement. “The LAPD had to make a difficult decision, in this case discontinuing using Flock services until we can get those data, privacy, security and sharing concerns ironed out through a contractual relationship.”

The news comes just days after our sister publication The Drive‘s Joel Feder reported how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. Officers said they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had erroneously tagged his car as stolen.

After the latest Flock contract news broke, 404 Media revealed that a July 10 audit by the LAPD Office of the Inspector General caught the department’s ALPR cameras generating 161 false stolen-vehicle alerts in just two months — each one ending with officers pulling over an innocent driver. Factoring in 337 alerts which “resulted in the recovery of stolen vehicles,” the LAPD’s cameras carry an error rate of 32.3 percent, effectively giving officers a one-in-three chance at pulling an innocent person over.

“During the review period, officers acknowledged 161 alerts as accurate license plate matches; however, subsequent investigations determined the vehicles were not stolen,” the report reads. “In addition to creating an inconvenience for vehicle owners, these inaccuracies can affect individual liberty interests, erode public trust, and potentially create substantial legal and financial liability concerns.”

The OIG report notes that officers are required to “attempt to verify all records prior to conducting an investigative stop,” though it didn’t disclose how many of the 161 wrongful stops were the result of an officer’s failure to do so. Instead, investigators blamed license plate records it says were “not updated in a timely manner,” which “may” lead cops to “act on inaccurate or outdated information, increasing the risk of unnecessary enforcement actions, including vehicle stops and wrongful detentions, or a confrontation with serious consequences.”

As 404 flagged, the LAPD approaches potentially stolen vehicles as “high-risk” stops. For the LAPD, these stops require drastic shows of force, including “calling for back up, air support, and a supervisor and ordering the suspect out of their vehicle,” the report reads.

It doesn’t take a large language model to figure out that this is an incredibly dangerous scenario for Black people in Los Angeles, who account for 19.5 percent of those killed by the LAPD, despite making up only nine percent of the city’s population.

Whatever way you slice it, it seems one of the most notorious police departments in the US has finally met its match.

More on surveillance: Flock Cameras Screw Up, Swarm Innocent Man With Armed Police

The post LAPD Abandons Flock Contract After Making a Horrifying Discovery appeared first on Futurism.

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Flock surveillance cameras are blanketing the country, and to no one’s surprise, innocent people are being caught in their dragnet.

At our sister publication The Drive, automotive journalist Joel Feder reports how he was suddenly swarmed by armed cops while test driving a Range Rover with his wife in Minnesota. The police used four squad cars to box him in in a coordinated maneuver; when he demanded an explanation, the officers said that they had been tracking him for days using Flock’s AI-integrated cameras, which had tagged his car as stolen — erroneously, as it turned out.

It was a startling example of how far reaching the controversial surveillance system had already become, never mind how flawed its conclusions can be.

“Whether you’ve actually stolen a car or are just rolling down the road having done nothing wrong, like me, once these systems have you in their crosshairs, there’s pretty much only one way it can go,” Feder wrote. “Welcome to the future. It’s scary out here.”

While still on the scene — every on-the-run criminal’s favorite place to lie low, a Kohl’s parking lot — the cops explained that the license plates on Feder’s Range Rover had been reported stolen by a dealership in Los Angeles. This made “absolutely no sense” to Feder, since car companies are extremely thorough about who in the media they loan their cars to. One officer presented photos taken by the cameras in the Flock app showing his SUV, plate number 34 10 DTM, confirming they had the right car — at least according to Flock.

But when Feder got Jaguar Land Rover on the phone, the automaker said that the reported plate number was 34 03 DTM, not 34 10 DTM. On New Jersey plates, the middle number is written smaller than the others, and for whatever reason, the number entered into the Flock system was recorded as 34 DTM.

This apparently drove Flock’s AI tech haywire, according to Feder. It “wasn’t registering that non-standard little number when it began picking up the Range Rover around town,” he wrote. “It just saw 34 DTM in large type and started alerting the local police.”

Because Flock’s surveillance network is so sprawling, this error was now a nationwide issue. “Anywhere a police department has a partnership with Flock,” Feder wrote, “any other JLR-owned car with the same plate structure is going to get flagged as stolen.” Later, Feder discovered that the car they were looking for wasn’t stolen after all; its license plate had been accidentally misplaced during a photo shoot.

Flock has surged to national attention in the past year, as police departments across the country partner with the firm to deploy its license plate readers and video cameras that can track vehicles and pedestrians. Often taking the form of towering pylons, it’s as if Flock wants residents to know they’re being watched, and its highly visible presence has served as a lightning rod for anxieties over privacy, surveillance, and police overreach.

Residents have fiercely protested against the deployment of Flock cameras, overrunning town meetings. Others have resorted to covering the cameras with trash bags or vandalizing them. Last month, a US Air Force engineer won public sympathy after being charged with sawing down over a dozen Flock cameras, with his legal defense’s GoFundMe page quickly raising tens of thousands of dollars.

On top of being widespread, Flock cameras are hooked into a centralized network, meaning the troves of footage they collect can easily be accessed by cops with little oversight. Flock and police departments argue that the cameras will only be used to investigate serious crimes, but there’re already mounting cases of cops being arrested for using Flock to stalk women. An investigation last year revealed that ICE was tapping into Flock’s network to conduct searches.

Flock’s overreach is already so vast that, in Feder’s case, he was warned to drive straight home and not cross into the neighboring towns — where their own Flock cameras would wrongly flag his car and sic the cops on him, too.

“You’re lucky we’re in Plymouth,” the officer who warned him said. “If you were in Minneapolis, they definitely would’ve come at you with guns drawn.”

More on surveillance: Woman Surprised When Flock Surveillance Tower Appears in Her Yard Without Warning

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