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Using traffic cameras for mass surveillance concept image
It is no surprise that Milwaukee is in the midst of a surveillance crisis. It was clear through the year-long push against Facial Recognition Technology (FRT) with the City and County, that residents don’t want to be surveilled by law enforcement and military contractors through weird public/private business relationships.
What we are hearing about FLOCK is more of the same.
FLOCK is an Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) system that Milwaukee’s Police and Sheriff Departments currently use to surveil us.
This week, the City of Appleton voted to end their usage of Flock. Just this month, Oshkosh and Sturgeon Bay refused to renew their contracts. Verona will end theirs also. Dane County will terminate its contract in May, and the City of Madison has ordinances protecting their residents from ALPRs being deployed.
They’re doing this for many reasons. First and foremost, there are no guardrails that can guarantee our safety, nor meaningful arguments for such invasive, large-scale surveillance that feeds into an already expansive web of digital stalking. ICE and other federal agencies have been shown to directly or sneakily access this information from law enforcement agencies all across the country.
It Goes On and On My Friends…
Right now, there is a web of over 92,000 FLOCK cameras and counting across the nation. This creates a dragnet surveillance of all people whether or not they are suspected of a crime or wanted for any particular reason. What many don’t realize is that the cameras pick up everything in the range of their view. Not just license plates. They use AI to hone-in on the licenses, but everything is covered. This has been shown extensively and regardless of the data accessible through the agreement with the Milwaukee Police Department.
FLOCK information is shared with the federal government. FLOCK CEO Garrett Langley says that groups that monitor FLOCK locations and speak against the use of FLOCK, like DeFlock are “terroristic organizations whose primary motivation is chaos.” A troubling response from someone we are paying to entrust with such power to surveil Milwaukee. His backers, like Mark Andreessen, are big donors to the current president and to deregulation of tech and crypto currencies. They have clear financial and political interests in the expansion of surveillance tech.
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FLOCK claims that it has never been hacked. This is completely false.
Musician and engineer Benn Jordan used a commercial search engine to show how easily you can identify and access the administration interfaces of FLOCK cameras. Identifying where they are, and none of the data or information was encrypted, no username nor password was required, they were publicly facing and accessible by anyone. You can click and see every single person, vehicle, place and activity that the cameras captured over 31 days. You can watch the footage in real time or access historic footage. Not just select police officers—anyone. He watched a man rollerblading and then looked at his phone and the camera’s AI automatically zoomed in on the phone. He watched a couple arguing in a market and then used easily accessible FLOCK, public data and Facial Recognition Technology to identify who they were, that they had traveled 45 minutes from home to church, that they had just had a child, and had debt based on their new baby, one just finished medical school, and the other was suffering from chronic irritable bowel syndrome.
Given how FLOCK has created and is marketing their new product NOVA to provide law enforcement a “one stop shopping” for an aggregated database for synthesis and sharing. Given how FLOCK financial backers are also supporters of our current federal government abuses. Given how FLOCK’s website says that federal agencies it partners with “can establish 1:1 sharing relationships” with other law enforcement agencies, it is incredibly dangerous and unwise for us to continue to use this omnipresent and invasive product. A product that forms such a large surveillance web to be integrated with other federal surveillance already used to threaten and criminalize immigrants and political dissenters.
Some People Started Singing It, Not Knowing What It Was…
In Carpenter v. United States (2018), a Supreme Court decision that stated accessing historical cell-site location information (CSLI) for tracking an individual's movements over an extended period invokes the Fourth Amendment. Meaning an enforcement agency is required to obtain a warrant based on probable cause. The current power and applications of FLOCK go far beyond this.
In cities like Syracuse, New York, their local ALPR system was searched 4.4 million times by police around the country without a warrant and shared with ICE despite the intentions of their common council, and despite promises to the contrary. This is just one example. It is being weaponized against immigrants, people seeking abortion access, demonstrators, and can be used for other problematic things we haven’t imagined yet.
And They’ll Continue Singing It Because…
About 40 community members showed up to the Fire and Police Commission meeting the night of May 7 to voice their objection to the use of FLOCK in Milwaukee. The Police also gave a presentation on what their new audit, and permissions procedures were.
Why you may ask? Because a now former Milwaukee Police Officer Ayala abused FLOCK to stalk a person he was dating, and her ex, 179 times. And, as we learned that night, there is another MPD employee who is being investigated for misuse. That’s not all we learned. We also discovered that there are patrol cars driving around the city with ALPR cameras. How many? Maybe 80 based on the sole source contract purchase approval waiver I looked at. The waiver drifted its way through a Finance and Personnel Committee meeting with little fanfare back in July 2025.
That’s a lot of mobile and stationary cameras video recording us all of the time—and to be clear, the cameras number in the hundreds, maybe the thousands, if we include all of the “Community Connect” cameras. Recording us all of the time. Without us knowing it. All of us. All of the time.
If this bothers you as much as it does me and the community leaders who showed up to voice their disapproval, please contact your alderperson and county supervisor. Tell them to end this annoying song.
