Today, on the last day of class, a student shared some of their ongoing efforts to mess with local Flock cameras and develop makeup patterns to defeat facial recognition. It was like realizing I’d had a Cory Doctorow character in class all semester, and it brought me joy and hope.

Flock continues to suck.

Wish I’d made more of a stink about Lexington adopting Flock cameras. It’s a creepy-as-hell technology, and we need to get rid of them.

So scary, so gross. Lexington needs to ditch Flock now.

Flock sucks, and I’m so mad that Lexington drank the Kool-Aid instead of resisting local surveillance. Just wrote my city council representative, the vice mayor, and the two at-large representatives.

Wish I’d done more to resist Flock adoption in Lexington.

Uggggggh, ALPRs suck.

ALPRs suck.

Flock provides the ALPRs here in Lexington, which makes this especially frustrating.

I have written council representatives about this more than anything else, and yet I suspect that it will go through again without a fuss. This isn’t the worst form of surveillance, but it is still surveillance, pure and simple.

Who is allowed to watch the watchmen? This is why I’m grumpy about Lexington being hush hush about its new automated license plate readers—it sets a precedent for secretive use of even more invasive surveillance.

Most of this budget sounds great, but why are we budgeting for 75 more ALPRs when we haven’t even finished the trial of the current ones yet? Not to mention that the trial is unlikely to evaluate ethics, only “effectiveness.”

There are a few yellow flags in this article for me. Quick and efficient sounds good, but are those the most important values in policing? What values do they stand in tension with? It’s great that there are policies against using a ALPR database for personal reasons, but these policies regularly get violated. No, these aren’t videosurveillance cameras, but that doesn’t make them harmless.

City council member responded to my concerned email by basically telling me I should have spoken up before the vote happened. Feels harsh but fair—want to do better about showing up and speaking up.

Lexington just installed plate readers on a trial basis, so this hits particularly hard right now. It’s scary and it needs to stop.

We should all be concerned about this. Describing this as “high tech” in the first line of the story fetishizes surveillance. It’s gross.

Nope nope nope nope. If plate readers are going to become more common, I’ve got to start biking more places. Not that that will protect against Ring. 🤮🤮🤮