Oakland City Council to Vote on $2.25 Million Contract for Surveillance Cameras that Send Data to ICE

The Oakland Police Department wants Oakland to spend $2.25 million to expand its contract with Flock, an AI-powered surveillance system, to install 20 new 24/7 video cameras and integrate potentially thousands of private cameras in businesses and homes seamlessly with their existing Flock system. Oakland’s Public Safety Committee will vote on Tuesday, November 18, on moving this deal forward to the City Council.

This comes just months after the San Francisco Standard revealed that San Francisco and Oakland police shared data from their AI-powered Flock surveillance camera system with federal law enforcement — including Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) — over 200 times, breaking state privacy laws. In November, the Berkeley Public Safety Committee revealed that "an external agency had searched [Berkeley Flock] data for the purposes of federal immigration enforcement, a practice that violates [Berkeley Police Department] policy.”

Concrete examples of police abuses enabled by Flock cameras are popping up as frequently as the cameras themselves, including stalking ex-girlfriends, tracking individuals seeking abortion access out of state, and sharing data on immigrants with CBP.

Last month, Oakland's Privacy Advisory Commission, which advises on surveillance technologies before votes happen in City Council, recommended against expanding the city’s contract with Flock. The commission made it clear that attempts to regulate Flock data misuse are doomed, “There are no adequate guardrails,” said commissioner Brian Hofer during the meeting. “State law, contract law, local ordinances — they’ve all failed. Lawsuit, settlement agreement, ignored, breached again. It all failed.” Following the vote, Brian Hofer and his fellow commissioner Sean Everhart resigned. Speaking to Oaklandside, they accused the City Council of refusing to take into consideration the Privacy Advisory Commission’s recommendations. Hofer specifically noted that Oakland Police “don’t care that the Trump administration is hunting people down, that red states are hunting people down. They’re just sending all this data over illegally.”

Over 500 Flock cameras surveil the East Bay (an incomplete map of camera locations can be found at deflock.me), almost all of which fall under the category of automatic license plate readers (ALPRs). Despite the name, these cameras capture much more than just license plates, creating a "fingerprint" of your car — think dents, scratches, and bumper stickers. The "license plate data" captured is actually a complete series of photos which has been revealed through a FOIA request in Washington state, reawakening concerns that this technology violates 4th amendment privacy rights. Concrete examples of police abuses enabled by Flock cameras are popping up as frequently as the cameras themselves, including stalking ex-girlfriends, tracking individuals seeking abortion access out of state, sharing data on immigrants with CBP, and accusing an innocent woman of theft.

Flock markets its technology explicitly on being able aggregate and centralize data into one searchable database. They claim to have equipment deployed in 5,000 “communities” nationwide — performing 20 billion license plate reads every month — but their real advantage comes at the integration of those systems. Flock customers can share data with one another with one-to-one agreements or by integrating their systems into a nationwide database. This creates the possibility for, with only a single access point, federal agencies or individual police officers to search over 80,000 cameras nationwide simultaneously.

It should raise alarm that during a period of massive federal overreach, “sanctuary cities” are directly and indirectly giving data to federal enforcement agencies, accounting for millions of individual violations of their own laws (CA SB 34 bans data-sharing with Federal agencies), by continuing to gather and share data using Flock systems. While Flock claims it has taken steps to keep data in the hands of its customers, there remains an obvious and glaring issue: the customers are cops, and cops in California have shown they have no qualms about handing data over to the feds regardless of legality.

While Flock claims it has taken steps to keep data in the hands of its customers, there remains an obvious and glaring issue: the customers are cops, and cops in California have shown they have no qualms about handing data over to the feds regardless of legality.

As of January 2024, at least 71 California law enforcement agencies had broken privacy laws by illegally sharing license plate data with out-of-state agencies and hundreds more violations are racking up all across the country. In light of this, many communities are choosing to opt-out of the Flock network. Cities are pausing programs, taking cameras down, and everyday people are getting organized. Still, despite their lip-service to progressive politics, Berkeley and Oakland City Councils appear poised to advance proposals to expand their respective Flock surveillance networks. Oakland’s City Council Public Safety Committee will vote on the proposal November 18th at 6pm — likely the last hurdle for this legislation before the final City Council vote. There is a rally planned at 5pm beforehand and organizers have prepared a toolkit for those who want to fight Flock. Now is the time to show city leadership that we will hold them to their word — and if they won’t fight back fascism, we will.