The revelation of a massive surveillance system, paid for with Norfolk taxpayers’ dollars, has raised concerns over privacy and data security. Automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) have been capturing the movements of thousands of Norfolk residents, leading one person to join forces with the Institute for Justice to sue the city.
Retired veteran Lee Schmidt sued Norfolk, Virginia, after discovering the city’s network of ALPRs tracked his vehicle 526 times in just over four months—about four times a day. Operated by Flock Safety, the 176 cameras installed across the city since 2023 log drivers’ locations without notice. Schmidt’s co-plaintiff, healthcare worker Crystal Arrington, was recorded even more—849 times in less than five months. Their lawsuit argues the warrantless surveillance constitutes an unreasonable search under the Fourth Amendment.
Flock Safety, founded in 2017, has rapidly become the largest U.S. ALPR provider, selling subscription-based services to over 5,000 police departments, 1,000 businesses, and homeowners’ associations. Norfolk signed a $2.2 million contract with the company through 2027, and its license data has already been accessed about 200,000 times. Beyond license plate readers, Flock markets drones, gunshot detectors, and body cameras.
Critics, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation, say the data points show mass surveillance, giving local police and potentially other agencies the ability to track movements nationwide. The American Civil Liberties Union has warned Flock’s centralized database could enable unprecedented government monitoring.
Flock contends ALPRs are constitutional, citing court rulings that define them as single public snapshots rather than continuous tracking. Some states, including Virginia, have recently restricted data sharing. In Virginia’s case, new legislation prevents ALPR data from being shared out of state.
The surveillance state has spread from large cities like Norfolk to the town of Bridgewater, Virginia, home to only 6,000 Virginians. Despite so few residents and crime statistics well below the national average, Flock cameras surveilled 60,000 vehicles. More disturbing is the proliferation of the collected data. In a 12-month period, the license plate data was accessed via Flock’s system nearly 7 million times by thousands of police departments across the country.
When Data Collection Becomes Data Analysis
With potentially billions of data points from companies like Flock and myriad products, advocates are also increasingly concerned with potential violations of privacy and individual rights as this data may become available to data analytics and AI development companies such as Palantir. (RELATED: ‘PERM’ Sham: How Companies Exploit Loophole to Skip Hiring Americans)
According to Nicole Bennett with the Center for Refugee Studies at Indiana University, Palantir’s Gotham platform is a tool “primarily used by governments” that is “built for police, national security agencies, public health departments, and other state clients.”
Palantir’s goal, Bennett says, is to gather “fragmented data, scattered across various agencies and stored in different formats” and turn it into an easily accessible database that can be searched. Bennett warns the proliferation of Palantir’s Gotham among federal, state, and local agencies makes it a de facto agent, or “partner” for governments and their actions.
To some, it wouldn’t be a stretch to be concerned about how data and photos captured by ALPRs could be used by Gotham.
While critics like Bennett argue Palantir’s government partnerships amount to mass surveillance, the tech company has been a key partner with the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. Palantir has been contracted to create a new software package that allows Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials access to “near real-time visibility” on illegal immigrants engaged in the self-deportation process while also overseeing those overstaying their visa and tracking violent international groups like MS-13 or Tren de Aragua.
One investigation turned up an apparent link between Palantir and George Mason University, in which since 2023, GMU has spent more than $30 million on Palantir contracts. While no further data on the contracts has been unearthed, it was discovered that the relationship between the two entities goes beyond procurement. Two GMU professors sit on Palantir’s Council of Advisors on Privacy and Civil Liberties while two Fellows at the Antonin Scalia Law School are employees of Palantir.
As surveillance technology continues to expand, questions will continue to arise about how companies like Palantir may eventually integrate the vast stream of data collected by it into broader government systems. (RELATED: Spanberger Caught Up In Defamation Lawsuit Over January 6th Press Release)