Flock Safety update, ICE Watch & One Million Rising
Flock Safety Update
At this week's South Pasadena City Council meeting, local activist Bill K. addressed the council about Flock Safety. Please read this related blog post on Flock Safety automated license plate reader data security.
Below is a copy of Bill's comments at 7-16-25 South Pasadena Council Meeting - Item 26, Flock Safety
"Greetings: Thank you for your willingness to re-examine the data usage and security aspects of the City’s contract with Flock Safety. As you consider the staff report, it’s important to remember that the choice you face tomorrow is not to either keep the system and the contract you have in place or shut the system down. Rather, the problem is to maintain the public safety benefits of the Flock system while protecting the values and rights of your constituents.
I will not reiterate the increasingly publicized misuses of data by police departments and ICE, both across the nation and right here in California, neither of which the staff report summarizes, much less acknowledges. I will not repeat the growing concern about these abuses from Virginia, to Illinois, to Colorado and Texas, and to our own state, which your staff fails to mention. Needless to say, these are blatant omissions.
Instead, I want to share what at best could be considered a mischaracterization or a hasty, rather than thorough and thoughtful reading of the contract you entered with Flock. Specifically, the staff report states:
“Notably, the system does not capture or analyze images of vehicle occupants. ALPR data is automatically purged after 30 days unless it is associated with an active investigation.”
But the contract the City entered and is attached to the staff report clearly states in Section 4.3:
“Agency [i.e., the City] understands and acknowledges that Flock has no obligation to monitor or enforce Agency’s intellectual property rights to Agency Generated Data. To the extent permissible, Agency grants Flock a non-exclusive, perpetual , irrevocable , worldwide, royalty-free, fully paid license to use, reproduce, modify, display, and distribute the Agency Generated Data for the sole purpose of providing Flock Services.”
Flock Safety “services” include integrating information from automated license plate readers, drones, surveillance cameras, facial recognition cameras, and myriad databases, using a wide array of emerging AI technologies in partnership with 39 companies that are integrating data provided by Flock into countless security products. Simply peruse the partner program page of the company’s website (https://www.flocksafety.com/partner-program). Flock’s website also invites private companies to become partners and integrate Flock held data into their respective products and services:
Peruse Flock’s partners page and you’ll find that one of the companies integrating Flock data and systems into its own is Motorola, which owns Vigilant Solutions, a competing provider of automated license plate readers used by the Los Angeles County Sheriffs Department and Los Angeles Police Department. ICE entered a contract with Vigilant Solutions during President Trump’s first term to access the data produced by its network of automated license plate readers ( https://www.hstoday.us/uncategorized/ice-acquires-license-plate-tracking-data-through-sole-source-contract/). Now, ICE has entered a contract with Palantir to create dossiers, ostensibly on immigrants who have overstayed their visas, etc., that will include automated license plate reader data (https://www.wired.com/story/ice-palantir-immigrationos/). So, retention and sharing of Flock Safety automated license plate reader data in order to make additional profits beyond what it makes from cities like South Pasadena is simply not acknowledged in the staff report. Nor is it acknowledged that the contract clause allowing Flock to repackage and use the data to develop additional profitable services is made possible solely by cities, such as South Pasadena, allocating tax money (and it does not matter where it comes from, the City, the state, or the federal government) to build out the Flock surveillance system. The bottom line here is that you have made your own residents Flock Safety’s products, putting us at risk of being surveilled and controlled by an errant federal government under the direction of a President who has repeatedly sought to repress protests and has suggested that protests are illegal (https://edition.cnn.com/2025/04/01/politics/trump-dissent-immigration-protests/index.html; https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/13/us/protests-legal-illegal-constitution-trump).
Accordingly, I cannot urge you strongly enough to:
1) Immediately direct SPPD to restrict data sharing with other law enforcement agencies until the City can amend its contract with Flock and incorporate, at a minimum, provisions outlined by the ACLU (https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/how-to-pump-the-brakes-on-your-police-departments-use-of-flocks-mass-surveillance-license-plate-readers). Better yet would be to incorporate the ACLU language, plus strike the provision cited above granting Flock the right to use data to develop additional products and services.
2) Meanwhile, direct your staff and City Attorney to research the concerns that have motivated an investigation in Illinois, a halt to expansion of the Flock automated license plate reader network in Denver, a new law in Virginia to severely restrict the use of automated license plate reader data to solving the most heinous crimes, plus adding transparency to how the data is used, and the complete scope of developments concerning surveillance technologies funded by local governments now being used by an authoritarian federal government.
3) Finally, if the data produced by Flock cannot be adequately restricted to legal and constitutional law enforcement activities, that you terminate the contract and swallow the costs outlined in the staff report. It is a small price to pay in order to help maintain your residents’ constitutional rights and to help prevent the nation from becoming fully subjected to the burgeoning authoritarianism in Washington.
In closing, you must look at the big picture and stand on the oath you took to the Constitution. Do not allow a private company to use our data to profit in ways that weaken our Constitutional rights and our state laws and values."
ICE Watch & NDLON's Adopt-A-Corner
NDLON have been hosting Adopt-A-Corner workshops and trainings for community members to support our day laborer and migrant workers during the ongoing ICE raids. This week NDLON hosted a really informative workshop including updates on the current legal status of the Temporary Restraining Order.
- Click here for a recording of the Zoom call.
- Click here to see the TRO (Temporary Restraining Order) summary.
- Click here for the Adopt a Day Labor Corner toolkit, including links to printable KYR cards and Emergency Cards
- For more information on the Adopt a Day Labor Corner campaign and for a calendar of upcoming trainings, click here
Upcoming Local Events
- Fri, Jul 18 @ 12pm
FightBackFridays - Pasadena City College › - Sat, Jul 19 @ 4pm
Solidarity Saturdays › - Thu, Jul 24 @ 7pm
Northeast Los Angeles Alliance for Democracy Monthly Meeting › - Sun, Jul 20 @ 10am
Lessons from Ukraine for the Struggle Against Authoritarianism & Fascism in the U.S. › - Wed, Jul 23 @ 7pm
LA Art Activism Connection Meeting › - Thu, Aug 14 @ 6:30pm
West Coast Connection Virtual Organizing Meeting – Alliance for Democracy ›
We are seeking volunteer(s) to help collate a weekly list of Altadena, Pasadena and other local actions for the newsletter. Send an email to: indivisible.alta.pasadena@gmail.com if you can contribute time to this work!
Spotlight: One Million Rising
On Wednesday, Indivisible launched the One Million Rising campaign - "a national effort to train one million people in the strategic logic and practice of non-cooperation, as well as the basics of community organizing and campaign design". Below are some resources from the first session and a link to watch the recording.
From Indivisible The One Million Rising Team:
"As we said on the call, we are in the period where a would-be authoritarian (Trump) attempts to rapidly consolidate power, eliminate checks on that power, and operate with impunity – this moment is referred to as an authoritarian breakthrough. Right now, that looks like Trump deploying the military in LA, firing thousands of qualified federal employees, exponentially increasing the budget of ICE, and so much more.
The important thing to remember: This isn’t new or unique to the United States – which means we know the winning tactics to fight back.
The key to stopping any momentum toward authoritarianism isn’t to attack the would-be ruler at the top, but to chip away at the vital institutions and communities that uphold their power, causing the entire house of cards to come tumbling down. Trump cannot consolidate power without well-maintained roads to transport his military muscle, vendors who sell to his detention facilities, and educated workers to fill in for his decimated federal workforce, just to name a few.
These pillars of support are much closer to us as everyday Americans than Trump is himself, which means we have the ability to shift them from compliance to defiance.
This is how we fight back against Trump’s authoritarian takeover -- by identifying our influence with the pillars of support his regime depends upon and convincing them to participate in strategic non-cooperation. For example:
Harvard teachers, students, and alumni pressuring the university to continue to reject Trump’s demands
Naval academy graduates convincing the school to return access to books removed during an anti-DEI push
How We Get Started
This approach gives us a historically effective means to fight back against Trump’s power grab with a simple tool all of us have access to: people power. There are thousands of ways to go about chipping away at his support, but they all involve activating those around us. As Maria Stephan said last night:
“Mass movements with millions of workers, teachers, lawyers, truck drivers, farmers, merchants, and students who are engaged in active defiance are very difficult to repress… More tactics means more opportunities to get new people involved, more ways to create leverage over an authoritarian regime, and more ways to generate and sustain momentum. And momentum is key to success.”
This is the critical moment to build the opposition we need to fight back. It is vital that we recruit, train, and mobilize a critical mass of people now before Trump’s authoritarian regime has fully consolidated power. And that’s what we need you to do.
Community gatherings
We are asking you to host a Community Resistance Gathering – a meeting of a small group of people, who have some relationship to each other, who come together to build their connection, knowledge, and resilience against fighting authoritarianism.
- Who should I invite? People you already have some connection to (e.g. friends, friends of friends, neighbors, colleagues), not strangers. Aim for ~10 people.
- Where should I host it? At home, a public space like a library, or somewhere else – wherever makes sense for you and your connections.
- What will we do at this gathering? Using our toolkit that we’ll train you on at the July 30 session, you’ll share the ideas we covered last night to get them aligned on the best tactics to fight back.
- When should this happen? You should start scheduling now, and ideally hold your gathering between July 30 and August 13 (our next two sessions), with a potential second gathering in the future.
- You don’t need to be an expert. If we wait for one million experts to lead community conversations and communal learning, we will be waiting forever. The point is for you to share with your connections as you learn together.
- We’re asking that you register your gathering on Mobilize. This will provide you with an easy way to contact all of your attendees, share details, and have a central place for information about the event.
This will also be how we know who is holding events. We want to make sure we are supporting folks who will be hosting with opportunities to ask questions and share knowledge. **We will be offering special office hours to event hosts who are registered through Mobilize.**
Over 100,000 people registered for our first One Million Rising call. If each of you hosts a gathering with 10 community members, we reach our goal of training one million people in strategic non-cooperation.
This moment, as the regime attempts to sprint toward an authoritarian breakthrough, is exactly when we need to stand together and fight back against the momentum Trump is attempting to build – but we can’t do that if we don’t activate a critical mass of people. These community gatherings are a crucial step in opposing Trump’s would-be dictatorship.
If you have any questions, feel free to email us at onemillionrising@nokings.org, and don’t forget to register for our next training on July 30."
