Wednesday, February 11, 2026

go check what cameras your district has

 ...and what cameras might have been placed on district property by the police1, due to what has been uncovered in an article jointly reported by The 74 and The Guardian:


The audit logs originate from Texas school districts that contract with Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company that manufactures artificial intelligence-powered license plate readers and other surveillance technology. Flock’s cameras are designed to capture license plate numbers, timestamps and other identifying details, which are uploaded to a cloud server. Flock customers, including schools, can decide whether to share their information with other police agencies in the company’s national network.

Multiple law enforcement leaders acknowledged they conducted the searches in the audit logs to help the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) enforce federal immigration laws. The Trump administration’s aggressive DHS crackdown, which has grown increasingly unpopular, has had a significant impact on schools.

Note that this may well not even be your local police department doing the search for ICE: 

Flock searches are typically broad national queries, and officers do not select individual cameras, he explained. Instead, with each search request, the system automatically checks every camera that Flock customers share with the nationwide database, including those operated by school districts.

The closing is very apt:

 “School districts are in a unique position, they have a unique level of responsibility to protect their students in specific ways”, including their privacy, Wandt said.

 It's worth noting that Flock has partnered with Ring, they of the Super Bowl ad that, while attempting to convince us all that they wanted to find lost puppies, made it newly clear that having a Ring camera is to now be part of a national surveillance network. While the comment from Ring was:

For the record, Ring says Search Party is not designed to process human biometrics, and that Search Party footage is not included in the company’s Community Requests service, which allows law enforcement to request video for voluntary sharing by Ring users. 

...do you want that on your house? Let alone in your school. 


Go ask.  

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1my recollection is that there are cameras that are on WPS property that are not WPS-controlled. Someone may want to look into that?

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