YouTuber Builds Police-Only ALPR, Gets Police Visit — SkimNews
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- Anthony Sistilli, a Canadian software engineer and YouTuber, built an ALPR camera configured to scan only police vehicles and posted real-world test footage on TikTok and YouTube, drawing two Peel Regional Police officers to his Brampton doorstep on September 20th.
- The officers told Sistilli his device could expose where they live, when shifts start, and their daily movements, arguing any anti-surveillance policies would risk leaking active-investigation details to criminals—the same arguments ordinary citizens raise about police-run ALPRs.
- Flock Safety's national network now spans over 120,000 cameras across 49 states capturing billions of monthly scans, and security researchers identified 335,701 cameras to publish a public "Flock Surveillance Map" exposing their locations.
- Investigative reports documented officers misusing Flock's database to stalk exes and acquaintances, fueling resident backlash that has included people covering and destroying cameras.
- Los Angeles and Fullerton are among municipalities that suspended or canceled Flock contracts over constituent privacy concerns, while Flock and its backers maintain the network lowers crime—a claim critics dispute.
- Hackers extracted over 27,000 clips and 1.6 million images from a stolen Flock camera in a 21-day span, contradicting the company's claims of on-device encryption and brief image retention.
Why it matters: A civilian-built tool reverse-engineering the technology police use to track everyone else—and the police response it triggered—turns the standard "nothing to hide" surveillance argument on its head and may accelerate the municipal defections already underway, with Los Angeles and Fullerton having already pulled their Flock contracts over privacy concerns.
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