According to Privacy International:

Mass surveillance is indiscriminate surveillance.

It uses systems or technologies that collect, analyze, and/or generate data on indefinite or large numbers of people instead of limiting surveillance to individuals about which there is reasonable suspicion of wrongdoing.

Under currently available forms of mass surveillance, governments can capture virtually all aspects of our lives…[which can result in a ] systematic interference with people’s right to privacy and all the rights that privacy enables, including the freedom to express yourself and to protest.

ALPRs are not the same as the average red light or toll cameras!

The Electronic Freedom Foundation (EFF) describe ALPRs as:

“… high-speed, computer-controlled camera systems that are typically mounted on street poles, streetlights, highway overpasses, mobile trailers, or attached to police squad cars. ALPRs automatically capture all license plate numbers that come into view, along with the location, date, and time. The data, which includes photographs of the vehicle and sometimes its driver and passengers, is then uploaded to a central server. Taken in the aggregate, ALPR data can paint an intimate portrait of a driver’s life.”

The American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) has argued that:

“Automatic license plate readers have the potential to create permanent records of virtually everywhere any of us has driven, radically transforming the consequences of leaving home to pursue private life, and opening up many opportunities for abuse.”

Mass surveillance erodes the rights and freedoms a city like Berkeley depends on for activism and civil progress. Research has long shown that government surveillance discourages speech, with people self-censoring and quietly opting out of activities to avoid being tracked.

That burden falls unevenly across communities. ACLU NorCal has warned that the data collected could be exploited to monitor marginalized communities or groups falsely labeled public safety threats, including immigrants and protesters. Not to mention, there is a legal pathway for the federal government to compel secret access to any data collected by using a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) warrant.

When cities adopt systems like Flock, they are not just using our tax dollars to lease surveillance equipment and softwares – they are outsourcing core public safety infrastructure to a private, for-profit company whose incentives are driven by profit and not aligned with the sanctuary values of a city like Berkeley.

Following the law does not offer protection from invasive abuses of power that mass surveillance networks enable. Were you one of the millions of attendees of the recent No Kings protests? Police departments across the country used Flock’s search feature to explicitly search for No Kings attendees. Maybe you or somebody you know decided to end a pregnancy. Police used Flock to track a woman who got an abortion across states.

Warrantless mass surveillance erodes our civil liberties and enables widespread abuse of power. Privacy is not about hiding information from authority, it’s about limiting the abuse of authority by exercising a fundamental freedom to control information about ourselves that could otherwise be abused.

If you have nothing to hide about your purchasing history, then why not allow anybody to see your credit card number? The self-evident answer is that others might use this personal information in a harmful way against you. The same exact argument holds for the personal information that mass surveillance systems collect and distill.

Existing private surveillance is problematic but comparatively a lesser threat than a purpose-built government-run surveillance apparatus like Flock. The ACLU explained that distributed, isolated private cameras like Ring place an intermediary between the police and the recordings, since officers must ask each owner individually and some may refuse.

While the intermediary isn’t foolproof, as we have seen LAPD use Ring footage requests to specifically target footages of protests against police violence, it isn’t a reason to shrug off the risks of adding a centralized, government-run layer on top, which makes the problem categorically worse, not just marginally bigger.

It is very difficult to establish causal relationships between ALPR use and crime reduction. Crime rates in the United States has been dropping steadily since the 1990s, so when policy departments point to reduced numbers of crime cases on a year-on-year basis, they are at best misinformed about how to interpret the data, but possibly intentionally cherrypicking the data to make a case for ALPRs. In other words, we don’t really know how much of the reduction they point to is really due to having ALPRs in our city, or some other broader society shifts. But even when we look at the available ALPR research, there’s currently no concrete evidence that the use of ALPRs reduce crime.

You also often hear Flock and police departments touting the effectiveness of ALPRs for improving “clearance rates,” which refers to the percentage of reported crimes that were solved by arrests or other means. But if you look to America’s most surveilled city – Atlanta, Georgia with its whopping 28,000+ integrated camera – the clearance rates across 8 major crime categories have not budged between 2021 and 2025, despite an eight-fold increase in the number of surveillance cameras.