You may have noticed that Flock Safety’s automatic license plate reader cameras—and the cops who misuse them—are getting a lot of coverage lately. This week, WIRED found a particularly wild case: A cop in Alpharetta,…
In recent months, there has been a surge in reports of police officers misusing automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) sold by Flock Safety to stalk former romantic partners—but details about these incidents are often scarce….
Alpharetta, a prosperous suburb of Atlanta, Georgia, is home to about 67,000 people, served by about 120 local police officers. It also hosts several dozen cameras sold by Flock Safety, the increasingly controversial surveillance company…
WIRED analyzed the software by examining code Flock served from its own login portals. Loading those pages returned a user interface for screens that would ordinarily appear only after a police user signed in, letting…
On March 13, 2025, Hugo Moreno-Mendez arrived at the McLennan County Probation Department in Waco, Texas, expecting a routine probation check-in. Instead, Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers were waiting to arrest him. According to a…
One missing underscore in a Skyrim-themed username put an innocent Nova Scotia man in prison for 18 months. A 2018 child-luring investigation, which began in Madison, Wisconsin, and eventually extended to Halifax, Canada, was based…
The toolkit’s authors frame the problem slightly differently: Their central worry is not only evidence hidden from prosecutors but defendants who are never told a surveillance tool touched their case at all, and defense lawyers…
Amid years of warnings that China’s notorious Volt Typhoon hackers may be pre-positioning within United States critical infrastructure, a closed-door war game for insurers played out an array of worst-case scenarios—revealing a menacing, disruptive threat….
Just after noon on a Saturday last month, a Skydio X10 quadcopter hovered about 200 feet over a San Francisco apartment complex, watching police chase a man hiding behind a parked car. The target of…
“I don’t think an AI model should have that kind of power over people’s lives,” Pegram says. Photograph: Alice Zoo In response to WIRED’s public records requests, Avon and Somerset Police provided a huge trove…
