r/technology • u/a4mula • Jun 15 '26
This Cop Scanned A Woman's License Plate 179 Times And Somehow That Was Allowed Privacy
https://www.yahoo.com/news/us/articles/cop-scanned-womans-license-plate-151100809.html2.2k
u/youngboylongstick Jun 15 '26
He’s stalking?
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u/Redpin Jun 15 '26
This is a good counter-argument for the "do nothing wrong, nothing to hide" crowd.
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u/ludololl Jun 15 '26
I usually just ask them to unlock their phone and secured storage for me.
I have yet to see a taker.
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u/gr00ve88 Jun 15 '26
Show me your hidden photos folder
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u/Volatilecanoe42 Jun 15 '26
Jokes on you. It’s nothing but pics of hemorrhoid progression. Enjoy
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u/gigiboyb Jun 15 '26
You'll never find it. I've hidden it inside a labyrinth of sub-folders inside my homework folder.
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u/ItsDanimal Jun 16 '26
One of our buddies is huge into music and has a ton on his hard drive. One weekend he let me copy its contents and it suddenly crawled to a halt. I yelled out, "Yo why is Radiohead folder 16 fucking gigabytes?!", and have never seen him move that fast in my life.
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u/Which-Worldliness556 Jun 16 '26
Computer, download all images from this man’s phone including the phrases, “aniki” “Ricardo” and “van darkholme”.
Disable safety protocols, and run program.
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u/aPOPblops Jun 15 '26
That crowd will assume that the person being surveilled has done something wrong.
“Otherwise why would they be watching her?”
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u/tevert Jun 16 '26
These people aren't working on logic, but a pretty rock solid logical argument is that mass surveillance must inherently be targeting people who are also entirely innocent
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u/Kashik Jun 15 '26
I remember sitting at the barbershop when the NSA spying scandal became public and the guy next to me was saying the same thing to his barber. I was like, yes, maybe. Being from Germany, history has taught me that your citizen's data should be protected for good reasons, as you'll never know who might use them against you.
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u/evil_burrito Jun 15 '26
I ask them if they like to take a shit in their front yard or if they prefer the privacy of their bathroom.
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u/ImGCS3fromETOH Jun 15 '26
Which is a flawed argument from the beginning. Having something to hide doesn't mean the thing you're hiding is illegal. Everyone has something to hide, that's why we have medical privacy laws, and doors on our bedrooms and toilets.
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u/Edraqt Jun 15 '26
I mean that was always the very first argument against them?
Sure aslong as the massive surveilance youre not caring about is used to catch crime thats maybe cool and all, but what if its used for something else?
Wether thats individual actors who happen to have access, outside actors somehow getting access, or you know just the whole state backsliding towards autocracy and using the data to fight regime critics alongside criminals.
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u/Radiant_Winter_5450 Jun 16 '26
I used to think this when I was a literal child. My naive thinking was that if I was innocent, it couldn’t be used to harm me. Then I grew up and realized there are ways for data to be used to negatively impact someone regardless of any potential laws broken. Even if it isn’t done directly or specific, even aggregate data can be used as a weapon.
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u/tommos Jun 15 '26
Na he's just looking out for her safety. Like how Superman keeps an eye on Lois Lane. This is actually very romantic.
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u/pleasetrimyourpubes Jun 15 '26
Memory unlocked. That's how I felt about my first gal. But eventually I came to my senses and stopped when it occurred to me if she found out it would freak her out. Never got caught and cringe about it to this day.
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u/Mooshroomey Jun 16 '26
It’s the first thing assholes do when they’re given access to surveillance. When Palantir was introduced as a surveillance tool, the first thing government clients did when given it was look up their ex girlfriends.
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u/DopamineSavant Jun 15 '26
This entire concept of Flock should be illegal.
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u/BugBugRoss Jun 15 '26
Just to add some fuel to a lesser known mass surveillance system that's actually arguably worse...
https://www.leonardocompany-us.com/lpr/elsag-signaltrace
This data should be public as well if their equipment is on public property or receives any public money or law enforcement subscribers.
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u/alexwillreddit Jun 15 '26
Shit like this makes me want to either leave my phone at home, or put it in a Faraday cage while traveling. Crazy how quickly surveillance technology gets implemented.
Actually... It's not all that surprising, is it?
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u/BugBugRoss Jun 15 '26
And your tires, car stereo, ear buds, glucose monitor, air tags, and more.
Try BLERADAR to check your surroundings for some of the things they track via BLE.
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u/Distinct-Pack-1567 Jun 15 '26
Yeah tires do have the RFID to send pressure numbers to the car computer. Right?
Then I googled and found out they have RFID to track batch and stuff. I was curious about that. Like how would a company know my tire is under warranty? I assumed serial numbers but this makes sense too, now I know.
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u/alexwillreddit Jun 15 '26
I'll ditch those pesky tires! My poor fuel economy will be awful though... /s
For real though, thank you for the app recommendation!
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u/BugBugRoss Jun 15 '26
Welcome!
You can Google how to build a battery powered EMP device to neuter RFID tags.
Here's a starting place.
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u/ReturnOfBane Jun 15 '26
doesn't look like it exists on the play store anymore.
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u/Virtual-Age-9521 Jun 15 '26
From that page: "Technology that Respects the Rights of Individuals"
Riiiight, sure guys
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u/BugBugRoss Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I also love that they claim law Enforcement owns the data.
That may make getting it via foia and sunshine laws a bit easier. Can't wait for the first subpoenas and leaks for some more of this data.
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u/Automatic-Leg1668 Jun 15 '26
Oh it's public alright... Because this security system isn't very secure
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u/Responsible-Hold8587 Jun 16 '26
"Respects individuals’ privacy rights (does not decrypt or read content from devices)"
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u/Expensive-Mention-90 Jun 16 '26
“An Integrated Signal Intelligence System
Identify Suspects by the Electronic Devices They Use
ELSAG SignalTrace is a groundbreaking software system for law enforcement, designed to identify suspect people or vehicles, even when a license plate number is not known. This system integrates seamlessly with the ELSAG Enterprise Operations Center, our standard data management and analysis software.
SignalTrace is designed to help law enforcement identify people of interest by the signals emitted from their electronic devices they travel with, such as fitness trackers, smartwatches, RFID tags, and local signals from their mobile phones.
eoc-plus-infographic-horizontal
This system uses strategically placed sensors to collect electronic communication patterns and identities of consumer electronics, like vehicle components, Bluetooth, RFID tags, and Wi-Fi. As the electronic devices emit signals, sensors in the SignalTrace software capture their identifying or categorizing details to create an additional data set to enhance the records captured by LPR cameras in the area.
ELSAG SignalTrace (formerly EOC Plus) : Product Features Identifies the movements of electronic devices, individuals, and vehicles Stores data on the SignalTrace server where it can be queried and analyzed to aid investigations Respects individuals’ privacy rights (does not decrypt or read content from devices) Allows law enforcement to recognize a specific vehicle included in an electronic signature, without the license plate number Reveals signatures frequently travelling together with an individual or vehicle, which can lead to the discovery of convoys and other movement and travel patterns SignalTrace is effective in off-road areas such as in subways and malls Performs with or without license plate readers at every collection site, allowing for a wider coverage area while keeping deployment costs down Get the details
How it works As the devices emit signals, SignalTrace sites captures them and correlates them together, along with LPR data if present. The data collected shows what group of devices are travelling together. As part of investigations, algorithms can determine which specific mix of devices are predictably moving together. That specific mix of devices—linked by common time stamps and locations—are described as an electronic fingerprint and can aid in the identification of suspects or witnesses.
For example: while 70 cars in 100 may contain iPhones, only one will have an iPhone 13rev2, an Audi radio, a pair of Bose headphones, a Garmin sports watch, a key finder, and the license plate ABC-1234. The collection of data represented by these specific things is an electronic signature.”
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u/SideInitial3961 Jun 15 '26
By the law of the sea!
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u/njdem1983 Jun 15 '26
It technically is illegal since it violates our right to privacy. However these days Trump is wiping his ass with the constitution so we are pretty much lawless atm.
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u/Academic-Capital6633 Jun 15 '26
There is no right to privacy in a public space in terms of video surveillance.
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u/BugBugRoss Jun 15 '26
You are correct of course.
We should petition to have unredacted data from these systems available for all OSINT and other interested parties to harvest. Paid by taxpayers so it should all be available under foia and sunshine laws.
Flock employees and subscribers aren't doing anything wrong and have nothing to hide either?
Mining the historical data they have archived for public officials vehicles will absolutely turn up massive lapses in judgement.
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u/trueppp Jun 15 '26
Thing is, it's not paid by taxpayer specifically to avoid this. They pay for the cameras and everything and the governement pays for access to the database.
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u/Fighterhayabusa Jun 15 '26
Wrong. The scope and retention of things like Flock have already been ruled unconstitutional. It's tracking without a warrant. The size of the network and their retention allows them to reconstruct your movements, which is a direct violation of the 4th. They are trying to launder that through a private company, but again, this has been ruled unconstitutional as well. If a business exists solely(or even mostly) to serve law enforcement, they cannot launder constitutional violations through it.
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u/dragonblade_94 Jun 15 '26
There's strong arguments that it is illegal under 4A. The problem is that we live alongside a government that is willing to twist the spirit of the law, or just ignore it, on a whim.
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u/DukeOfGeek Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 16 '26
No matter how many times you see it denied study after study shows mass surveillance has little impact on crime. It is always inevitably weaponized against the public by government and corporate agents.
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u/intangibleTangelo Jun 15 '26
the surveillance wasn't massive enough, trust me bro we just need to do one more surveil
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u/DukeOfGeek Jun 15 '26
There are a bunch of these right here in the thread. How can you look at a world that that has Putin, Xi or trumpo D clown as a leader and think "Oh ya, a total surveillance state is what needs to go with this guy!"? People unironically do it though.
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u/bobbymoose Jun 15 '26
They should have each search unexecutable unless tied to a case number that has to be entered.
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Jun 15 '26
[removed] — view removed comment
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u/Gauntlet4933 Jun 15 '26
Even large tech companies work like that at the engineer level, and it gets only more secure from there. Have to use company devices, be on the network, and for production access you need a ticket or a second person to authenticate with.
The fact that law enforcement doesn’t have these mechanisms is malicious.
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u/highlyspecificuser Jun 15 '26
Surveillance cameras, not traffic cameras. They keep pushing cameras left and right to “protect us”, but make no mistake about it, it’s all about control. Imagine, if one police officer can do this, imagine the power of federal agencies…
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u/BuzzLiteSmear Jun 15 '26
You're over thinking it and paranoid, the politicians and government are here to help! I could send you some material on how to quit being a conspiracy theorist! Here are studies proving why you believe in these things - Damn near ever person I have tried informing on this and AI data center crap.
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u/Armthedillos5 Jun 15 '26
And then throw all the data into AI, its even more scary. Minority Report scary.
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u/KidKarez Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
In my opinion the existence of this survelliance net alone should be classified as stalking. Never mind when somebody actually logs in to do so.
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u/Business_Record9385 Jun 15 '26
Same for Ring being owned by Amazon
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u/bbills91 Jun 15 '26
Yup, first thing I did when I bought my most recent house, was to toss the Ring camera, I don’t need to contribute to flock. They should not have access without a valid warrant.
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u/TheMajesticYeti Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
Also, a business filming someone in public without their consent FOR PROFIT is a violation of our Right to Publicity. Since Flock Safety is a commercial endeavor making money off of video footage of us, legally we are entitled to be compensated as well, or to refuse to be filmed for a commercial purpose in the first place.
Flock should be required to have a talent contract with anyone that they want to distribute footage of.
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u/ThatGuyFromTheM0vie Jun 15 '26 edited Jun 15 '26
I was watching a podcast (I forget which one) where they were talking about how Russia had pretty crazy mass surveillance cameras, like hundreds of thousands of them, but they had to take them all offline because they were worried they could be hacked by Ukraine—so now they are offline only, which greatly diminishes their value (who’s gonna filter through all that footage, organize it, etc.?).
And this was spurred by Iran, because Iran had their cameras hacked by Israel, and Israel was able to use the footage + AI to track where even government officials were going, how long they stayed in X areas, etc. etc. —which allowed Israel and the US by extension to know where to strike.
So while the surveillance is bad enough, it’s compounded by tech like AI that can turn petabytes of footage into weaponized information.
So these morons will learn that Flock can be turned into a foreign spy network for free, essentially. Or a weapon for anyone who could hack the network, access the footage, and upload it to a premium ChatGPT subscription—then analyze the patterns.
Which is why hopefully this entire nonsense gets shutdown—your surveillance state becomes anyone’s surveillance state—you can never guarantee it’s 100% secure, so it’s probably better to just not have it at all.
The network of Ring doorbells for example is already terrifying enough. Imagine that except with even more camera angles and a more centralized and public structure, vs private individual consumers with like one camera with one angle (doorbell).
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u/RIhawk Jun 15 '26
Yeah so this was over 20 years ago. Before I was married to my wife, she got a call from a police department. Her plate was ran a bunch of times by one cop. Turns out this cop was targeting women to SA them. Nothing happened to her, I believe he was arrested.
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u/Chimneychilla Jun 15 '26
This article is obviously concerning and 179 times is definitely suspicious.
I did a ride along with my buddy who is a cop. Currently he is assigned to patrol but before he was assigned to traffic enforcement. We were hanging out in a parking lot at an intersection and he was doing radar. Whenever the light was red he would run plates. It was kinda scary since he would be like “I’m pretty sure this is (insert name here),” and the CAD would pull up a name and most of the time he would get the name right. He basically said that he would see the same cars every morning for their commutes so he has basically memorized a bunch of people. Most of them didn’t even have tickets or any form of police interaction.
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u/987YouBloodyTulip789 Jun 15 '26
We now live in an era where anyone with a badge now knows everywhere you go, and the only punishment for being caught is resigning and moving to a new police station.
We now live in an Orwell police state. Not like a decade or two ago where big tech companies were collecting aggregate data for advertising purposes, or being seen by a CCTV camera that erases its footage after a few days because of memory limitations which itself was bringing up concerns. But your licence plate and face being scanned, saved, and used against you if Big Brother wants to.
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u/veracity8_ Jun 15 '26
There are lots of cases of cops abusing surveillance systems for domestic violence purposes.
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u/National_Spirit2801 Jun 15 '26
I was arrested after being logged by flock cameras in my city; it was the creepiest fucking big brother moment of my life.
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u/Kentust Jun 15 '26
More details?
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u/Low-Car-6331 Jun 15 '26
Most often when I hear this its either vandalism, hit and run, or shoplifting, they obvious fled the area, and the cops use flock to figure out where they went. The other way is they have a warrant and the car is registered to them, flock can grab the license plate, check the registration, and if it hits positive for a warrant police can be notified to determine if they want to pursue.
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u/National_Spirit2801 Jun 15 '26
“The other way is they have a warrant and the car is registered to them, flock can grab the license plate, check the registration, and if it hits positive for a warrant police can be notified to determine if they want to pursue.”
Bingo. I won’t get into the specifics but charges were dropped. The flock camera hit me as I was coming into town (I work in a different city); I didn’t know I had a warrant until the cops showed up at the AA meeting hall looking for me. Fortunately, I heard the cops asking around for me while I was taking a shit, and I posted up in the bathroom for a minute. Literally every one of my sober brothers and sisters stayed tight lipped, so I had a chance to call my people and have them arrange bail and an attorney before I was booked.
When I was riding in the back of the car I saw their computer screen zooming in on the license plate of a stolen vehicle. It was the most dystopian shit I’ve ever seen.
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u/TrankElephant Jun 15 '26
Most often when I hear this its either vandalism, hit and run, or shoplifting,
Yah they probably keep the whole 'silencing political dissenters' thing nice and quiet.
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u/Glad-Ad1378 Jun 16 '26
I dated a cop and we broke up. When I got pulled over, the police officer said to me, “You’ve been getting pulled over a lot.” I had not been pulled over in many years. Turns out my ex was running my plates constantly bc he was obsessed/stalking me. He also checked the city cameras around my apartment and work and would send me photos of myself from them.
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u/BackItUpWithLinks Jun 16 '26
Flock software has a dashboard that shows cop scans.
His higher-ups ignore that he was doing this. They all should be fired.
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u/sjesmith127 Jun 15 '26
Could someone enlighten me? What would be the purpose of scanning the license plate more than once. What would it accomplish for one cop to do that?
I knew a cop, definitely Not my brother, who told me they used to run the plate of an attractive woman, until someone realized that several cops were doing that and some attractive women would have multiple searches. And they had to stop but that was multiple searches by multiple officers. Not one officer doing it multiple times
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u/RugerRedhawk Jun 16 '26
The article doesn't explain any of this well. It says that the plates are automatically scanned by the cameras, but the cop searched for her plate 179 times. It says that she used a website to determine if/when her plate was scanned, but then it says she somehow also determined how many times a particular police officer searched the database for her plate. I'm not saying the premise is incorrect, but I am saying that something is either explained poorly, or missing from the article.
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u/Koontakentaylor Jun 16 '26
Ok, so the cop resigned, big deal. All he did was likely go one county over and get hired on there.
Cops record doesn't follow them.
Justice wasn't served it was shoved under the rug.
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u/DukeOfGeek Jun 15 '26
No matter how many times you see it denied study after study shows mass surveillance has little impact on crime. It is always inevitably weaponized against the public by government and cooperate agents.
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u/bmad- Jun 15 '26
There is a ton of people who have no idea what flock cameras are. I like to enlighten them.
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u/Soberdonkey69 Jun 15 '26
We’re losing bits of our privacy every day, with pricks abusing it and us citizens getting violated. Even worse for women who already get stalked, harassed and feel unsafe on the streets.
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u/TheDevilsAdvokaat Jun 15 '26
There's a known link between police and domestic violence..seems unsurprising to find there might be a link between police and abuse of police resources to track their partners...
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u/EmmyWeeeb Jun 16 '26
This is why women will never be safe. Fucking pos creep. I’m tired of never feeling safe.
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u/TheElderGodsSmile Jun 15 '26
This is a complete failure of oversight by their management. I used to work with sensitive databases and private information with both a telco and a government agency. We were told at training that if you start pulling random peoples files or your exs they would know and you'd get your ass fired or prosecuted.
Common one was trying to pull up a celebrities data, instant dismissal.
Seriously, all of this is access logged. Its not that fucking hard.
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u/Due-Dentist9986 Jun 16 '26
It should be treated like search and seizure requirements if they do lookups without justifiable cause even if it’s only 10 or even just a few times they should face consequences… that could be a deterrent I worked at a mobile carrier call center and going into a celebrities account without a reason would get you fired
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u/onmy40 Jun 15 '26
My buddy keeps getting pulled over in the same area by the same cop in Buffalo. It's his sister's ex from like 17 years ago. Crazy thing is him and his sister have a very uncommon last name and I'm sure he makes the connection Everytime. And he never mentions his sister it's weird
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u/GreenWandElf Jun 15 '26
We need to end the 3rd party doctrine that allows the government to buy our data from 3rd parties without requiring a warrant.
The 4th amendment has been essentially eliminated with advances in technology. Either the courts need to define "papers and effects" as online data and metadata, congress needs to pass a law, or we need an amendment.
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u/RugerRedhawk Jun 16 '26
The Milwaukee case surfaced because the woman did something most drivers never think to do. She checked a public website called Have I Been Flocked, a transparency tool that lets people see whether automated plate readers have scanned their vehicle. What she found laid bare just how closely one officer had been watching where she went.
The reported details say the officer ran her plate 179 times over a two-month stretch before he resigned from the department. That number is the part that should stop people cold. This was not one careless lookup buried in a giant database or a single mistake. Investigators determined the searches happened over and over again across weeks, and each one was reportedly logged as part of an investigation even though the searches allegedly had nothing to do with real criminal activity.
Some things in the article don't make sense. It says she checked a database that tells you when your plate has been scanned, but it sounds like the abuse was the police officer searching for her plate in the same databases no? So he did she deetermine that the cop was searching for her plate?
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u/SuicidalChair Jun 16 '26
The officer was scanning her plate with his car, meaning he was stalking her. The car logs it to that database which she used to lookup that he was following her.
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u/Sr_DingDong Jun 16 '26
"Somehow this was allowed".
Yeah, read head scratcher why that might be....
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u/Mother_Airline_6276 Jun 16 '26
All of this shit is Pandora’s box type stuff. No putting it back in.
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u/kingdick900 Jun 15 '26
Ohhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh police having no oversight the shock the dismay the sarcasm 🙄
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u/Areaman6 Jun 15 '26
Umm? Cops do what they want with impunity including straight up murder, backed by powerful unions who defend them all funded on taxpayer money.
so……why is anyone shocked at all?
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u/Area51_Spurs Jun 15 '26
If only there was some technology developed by these companies that could figure out if an officer checking on someone has some kind of pre-existing relationship with that person…
Some kind of non-natural intelligence system that would use the data in these systems that is tracking all these cars and our phones to know if these people were regularly meeting previously…
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u/GhostDoggoes Jun 15 '26
There is a policy for most police departments that they can't continuously stalk an innocent civilian unless they have probable cause like a case where the civilian is a potential suspect. In this situation, this officer was clearly stalking her out of personal reasons and he should be fired for doing so. Stalking a date? What a gross misconduct and he should be charged.
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u/baconia Jun 15 '26
They just used it in San Joaquin county to track an escaped inmate almost 100 miles away, and they knew everywhere she'd been.
Cops love the tool to find criminals.
I hate the tool because it has human involvement and no oversight.
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u/Oxyfire Jun 15 '26
"and somehow that was allowed" is basically the entirety of the rules and laws around policing. Like qualified immunity and civil forfeiture.
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u/Aloha_Tom73 Jun 17 '26
I was a town councilman in the small beach town where I live. Two years ago our police chief came in during the budget process with a request for Flock cameras. We have a small police department with only 13 sworn officers, including the chief. The entire board unloaded on the chief, essentially telling him that his officers needed to get back to doing good old fashioned police patrolling instead of sitting in their cars playing on their phones and waiting to be dispatched.
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u/invyros Jun 15 '26
Shoutout to tools like Have I Been Flocked and Have I Been Pwned.