Axon interfered heavily with that process and -- after the legislative workgroup had well concluded and just a couple of hours before the Senate committee was to vote on it -- managed to neuter one of the key protections in the bill.
Axon is not "better" than Flock, they are just slightly less transparent about some aspects and slightly less radioactive.
Community groups that have formed and activated against Flock should continue to harass local governments that immediately switch to Axon as a replacement.
I was seethed by what happened to it, and sadly unsurprised by the attitude LE took. I want restraint, but I felt like so many concessions had already been made to get it into work session. E2EE was important, but we're still left with two ends that are deeply untrustworthy, and a bunch of regulations about data governance that I don't trust the state to be able to meaningfully oversee... especially among a patchwork of LEAs across the state. When lapses inevitably happen, I think they're going to mostly undetected, and those that are will be quietly swept under the rug without consequence to anyone.
Funnily enough, Portland (apart from big box parking lots) seems to be empty of those. I remember them trying to push ShotSpotter and being slapped down by the city's progressive wing.
I worked most closely with Senator Floyd Prozanski. He's my local senator, and was in many ways an ideal fit for this. After we successfully kicked Flock out of Eugene, Springfield, and Lane County, he reached out to form a legislative workgroup. Over a few months of effort, we developed SB1516: https://olis.oregonlegislature.gov/liz/2026R1/Measures/Overv...
Depending on where you fall on the spectrum of opinions on ALPRs, this is either a sort of okay bill or a pretty terrible bill.
This is why I'm increasingly jaded with 'get involved with your local legislative process!' proponents. If you don't have the ability to lobby around the clock and make campaign or in-kind political donations (and know how to communicate your willingness to do that), then you're at a massive disadvantage. As well, the process itself is highly corruptible, eg altering the text of a bill just before a scheduled vote.
As a general matter, I'm increasingly disgusted with the prevalence of tactics like holding votes in the dead of night or in closed sessions. Politicians engage in a lot of tricks to evade scrutiny from their constituents, relying on the fact that once a piece of legislation is passed people might be angry but the politician can often get away with saying 'there was no other choice, we have to work within the process' or some similar empty truism.
But also, having just been through this process (for my first time!): however terrible you think the political process is, it's worse.
You could say similar things about Palantir - that it’s just a figurehead and that the NSA / TIA has similar capabilities but it’s still important to use the figurehead as an example to others.
But yes in general I think it’s important to not let this stop here. Denver needs to be pressured to remove the cameras entirely. This is a defensive move on Denver’s part and it shows they’re on their back foot.
Also, your Reps do read your correspondence, and there's a critical moment coming up in this bill.
Drop me a line at contact@eyesoffeugene.org and I'll reply with a Signal link and we can talk more.
They must be making huge profits, assuming every bodycam needs some kind of recurring revenue (for evidence.com, maintenance, replacements). BUT as far as I can tell, they are also taking the judicial requirements very seriously. Unlike Flock, I haven't heard anything about AXON providing tools to circumvent the 4th amendment. In fact, AXON makes tools that make it easier to comply with the law. For example, record requests for bodycam videos are (again, afaik) easy to satisfy with their tech.
I don't know what ownership they have of videos stored on their services. Can they use it for LLM training? can they sell anonymized data? do they? no idea, but trust in Flock is at about a 0 out of 10.
Freedom of Information requests to axon seem to be given our somewhat freely given how large the bodycam genre on Youtube is.
How about Denver just doesn't surveil its citizens, at all?
I have to guess that the folks clamoring to put computer vision "back in the bag" are somewhere on the margins, and resemble straw more than steel.
https://courthousenews.com/judge-holds-norfolks-license-plat...
> "Because rapid technological advances, such as the rise of artificial intelligence, make it impossible to predict how police surveillance will evolve, the Fourth Amendment analysis must remain nimble even as it remains grounded in founding-era traditions," the George W. Bush appointee wrote in a 51-page opinion. "Plaintiffs are unable to demonstrate that defendants' ALPR system is capable of tracking the whole of a person's movements."
> Davis drew distinctions from two significant precedents in determining that the pair's Fourth Amendment challenge lacked merit. In Carpenter v. United States, the Supreme Court held that the government violates the Fourth Amendment when it accesses a suspect's historical cell site location information without a warrant. The Fourth Circuit ruled in Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle v. Baltimore Police Department that the department's surveillance program, which captured and stored aerial images of nearly the entire city, violated the Fourth Amendment.
> Davis ruled that, unlike in cases where the government tracked people's movements through cellphone data and aerial photos, the collection of Flock data does not capture enough information to catalogue citizens' movements in their entirety. Davis reasoned that the 176 cameras, located in 75 clusters across the city, do not constitute a search.
Alot of these tech vendors have been a way to launder data gathering to avoid neeidng to get warrants
https://www.flocksafety.com/blog/axon-plans-to-sever-apis-wi...
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Many states do not consider a trailer hitch ball as "obstructing" the license plate...
...so I have a trailer hitch ball hung directly across my identifier, entirely obscuring the plate (but not "obstructing," to letter of poorly-written laws e.g. Tennessee's).
Been rolling with it for months and nobody cares. Now I'm in Flock's database as the white Camry with no visible identifier (no bumper stickers nor tag visible).
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First time you get cited for "obstructing license plate," in Tennessee, is a $10.00 fine. Second is $20.00. This state also doesn't require plates for trailers, so after my second citation I'll just start hauling my 2ft long canoe trailer everywhere (which conveniently covers license plate).
i.e: yes, my vehicle is now "white car, obscurred plate" — but if Officer Joe Blow is searching for my specific license plate... he'd have to try harder (e.g. I have intentionally sped past a traffic camera to see if I get the ticket — have not, to date [0]).
Obviously if you make yourself too big a target (i.e. manhunt level searching) this won't work. See <https://xkcd.com/1105/>. I roll around GTA-one-star (or less), so this is helpful.
[0] My state has entirely banned the enforcability of photo citations (except passing school bus == good), but a private company still sends out speeding notices — my obfuscation bare minimum saves somebody the postage fees.
