Two police officers walked into a doughnut shop.
It’s not the opening line of a joke; it’s what I saw as I was working on an early draft of this story in March at the Staunton Dunkin’, about a quarter mile from where my vehicle was captured on a Flock camera in January and February coming back from my trips to Cardinal’s Roanoke office.
Their eyes may have strayed to the racks of Boston creme, lemon-filled and coconut-covered doughnuts as they strode to the counter with purpose, but they were here for something else.
Surveillance footage.
The research for State of Surveillance showed that you can’t drive anywhere without going through a town, city or county that’s using public surveillance of some kind, mostly license plate reading cameras. I wondered how often I might be captured on camera just driving around to meet my reporters. Would the data over time display patterns that would make my behavior predictable to anyone looking at it?
So I took a daylong drive across Cardinal Country and asked 15 law enforcement agencies, using Freedom of Information Act requests, to provide me with the Flock LPR footage of my vehicle. My journey took me over 300 miles through slices of the communities those agencies serve, including the nearly 50 cameras they employ. And this journey may take me to one more place: an April Fool’s Day hearing in a courtroom in Roanoke. There, a judge will be asked to rule on a motion to declare the footage of the public to be beyond the reach of the public.
But while Roanoke and Botetourt and two other police agencies denied my request for that footage, nine agencies complied and searched their data for signs of me passing through.
Here’s what I found.
Check out the other stories in this ongoing series.
February 13, 2025, I left Staunton around 7:30 in the morning to head toward Roanoke. Richmond Avenue, on the outskirts of the city, is probably the way most people make their way out of town to interstates 64 and 81. It’s a significant crossroad of the region’s major east-west and north-south highways.
Staunton maintains at least one of its six Flock cameras on a local intersection just shy of the cluster of on- and off-ramps. It makes surveillance-sense to position cameras to see who’s coming in and who’s leaving your town at such a singular crossroad.
I was not captured by a Flock camera there, though.
As part of its services, Flock advises police on where to place its tech. The top priority appears to be places of entry and exit around the community, notably near the main highways. It’s possible that Staunton doesn’t have a camera taking pictures of who is leaving town; it’s also possible my vehicle’s plate was blocked by heavy morning traffic and so no photo could be taken.
It was a cold morning, but truckers and car drivers were behaving on the morning commute. Staying on I-81, I passed through Augusta, Rockbridge and Botetourt counties, which between them have at least eight Flock cameras. I didn’t think any would be pointed at the main highway because currently Flock can’t place its cameras on state property.
Ninety uneventful minutes later, I pulled into Roanoke to go to the Cardinal office and visit my Roanoke members of our own Cardinal team — which, in an unintentional irony in this story, we refer to as The Flock.
I got into town just after 9:15 a.m. I know that because a Roanoke Police Department Flock camera captured my car traveling southbound down Williamson Road near the Salem Avenue intersection at 9:16:09 a.m. (That photo, as well as another, were provided by the Staunton police, as part of their arrangement to access other agencies’ data in their Flock searches.)
You can see from the image below exactly what Flock technology captures: a decent shot of the back of any vehicle that passes, a readable image of the license plate.
Part of Flock’s proprietary tech determines the make and model of the vehicle and also notes if there are bumper stickers, bike racks, any other unique markings that would help identify that vehicle. That generates a “vehicle fingerprint” for every car or truck, which none of the agencies I FOIA’d would provide me. That fingerprint could prove helpful in the case where a witness or other camera captured some non-license-plate information about a vehicle, like specific bumper stickers or a roof rack.
I parked my car on Church Avenue, w
12 Comments
Molitor5901
I've seen this done before by journalists requesting license plate reader data but it's another nail in the coffin of anonymity. Dare I say unless you wear a full face mask, change your walking gait, and just about every habit you have, there is no escape. In television I've seen talk about masks and garments that help prevent this, but I think it's a zero sum game. You will be tracked. You will be photographed, profiled, analyzed and that data is likely sold to the highest bidder and it's only accelerating.
tyingq
It talks about Flock branded surveillance in several places, then the news site itself asks for donations with this tagline "Thanks for joining our flock!". Short double-take on that donation area for me.
boomboomsubban
Don't FOIA requests charge you for the manhours it took, or is it just the data transfer cost? It might vary by state now that I think of it. I wonder how much these cost.
Saying these requests constitutes a felony is ludicrous, hopefully the judge sees the case as a bad prank.
gosub100
Let me guess: get the police to pay for them and sell the data to advertisers.
sebstefan
I don't think there should be an expectation of anonymity for the specific case of operating a car on a public road. It's a lot of responsibility, so you should be scrutinized when you do it.
That's part of my grievances against the urbanism of the U.S.A. When the only viable option to get around is cars, there is no privacy.
It's important to advocate for public places to be livable for everyone, not just drivers.
gadders
I fell arse over tit at a London tube station and requested the CCTV footage under the GDPR. Got a lovely full colour DVD of me stacking it.
noodlesUK
I think the crazy thing about ANPR/ALPR is just quite how simple it is to create a massive panopticon. The UK has a fairly established national ANPR system, and it generates on the order of 90M records per day [1]. All of this data is available to various law enforcement agencies. If you drive, you're probably being recorded in a way accessible to the PNC every day.
Because of how effective this is for catching even fairly minor violations like failure to pay road tax, number plate cloning is becoming pretty common (comparatively) in the UK. This means that you can easily get swept up in a police dragnet because someone has stolen your car's identity.
[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-anpr-ser…
josefritzishere
Creepy AF. We live in a prison.
DeathArrow
If I were to be a road pirate, I would only have used government license plates. Let them fine themselves!
throwALPRsaway
[dead]
leoqa
Most cars already emit RF signals for WiFi, Bluetooth and 5G. These can be fingerprinted along with the physical attributes to increase accuracy.
I’m in support of better investigative tools and stricter governance. I’m not worried that my car location would lead to a false arrest- that is like being afraid of lighting striking.
unyttigfjelltol
Next Uber will be pitching a privacy-centric upgrade, similar to VPN positioning today, to preserve privacy in the face of mass roadway surveillance.