Tuesday: Speak out against surveillance!
The Cambridge Public Safety Committee will review whether to roll out Flock surveillance cameras on December 9, 2025 at noon to 2pm. If they are approved, Flock would put up at least twelve Automated License Plate Recognition (ALPR) cameras around Cambridge, as we reported previously.
Police have used such data to identify women who sought an out-of-state abortion and to record who goes to protests. Flock shares this data with ICE and recently announced a partnership with Amazon’s Ring to make easier for Flock customers to request recordings from Ring cameras.
Cambridge PD says the data won’t be shared outside of Cambridge and people’s rights will be protected, but Flock hasn’t agreed to this limitation. We know that Flock shares the data widely. Once the ALPR records and video are in Flock’s system, they are as good in ICE’s hands or the hands of any other police department who wants to track people.
The Public Safety Committee meeting will be in the Sullivan Chamber of Cambridge City Hall at 795 Massachusetts Avenue. You can participate in person or via Zoom. After this meeting, the committee’s proposal will go back to the city council.
If you would like to provide public comment, you can use their public comment sign up form to sign up. The meeting can be viewed on the city’s open meeting portal. Cambridge residents may also view on Channel 22-City View Local Access.
We especially encourage Cambridge Pirates to speak out at the meeting.
masspirates.org/blog/2025/12/0…
ICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras
A division of ICE, the Secret Service, and the Navy’s criminal investigation division all had access to Flock’s nationwide network of tens of thousands of AI-enabled cameras that constantly track the movements of vehicles, and by extension people, according to a letter sent by Senator Ron Wyden and shared with 404 Media. Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), the section of ICE that had access and which has reassigned more than ten thousand employees to work on the agency’s mass deportation campaign, performed nearly two hundred searches in the system, the letter says.In the letter Senator Wyden says he believes Flock is uninterested in fixing the room for abuse baked into its platform, and says local officials can best protect their constituents from such abuses by removing the cameras entirely.
The letter shows that many more federal agencies had access to the network than previously known. We previously found, following local media reports, that Customs and Border Protection (CBP) had access to 80,000 cameras around the country. It is now clear that Flock’s work with federal agencies, which the company described as a pilot, was much larger in scope.
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Subscribe nowICE, Secret Service, Navy All Had Access to Flock's Nationwide Network of Cameras
Flock has built a nationwide surveillance network of AI-powered cameras and given many more federal agencies access.Joseph Cox (404 Media)
