This is from a 2024 company presentation:

Officers can also tap into data showing a car’s decals, bumper stickers, back and top racks—along with temporary and unique state tags.

Flock calls it a “Vehicle Fingerprint” and it’s touted as a way for law enforcement officials to get more information “even when you don’t have full plate information,” the company’s presentation shows.

The company gives police officers the ability to search that data as well, to “build stronger cases with less information upfront.” That includes being able to locate multiple vehicles law enforcement officials believe are moving together and what Flock calls a “multi geo search.”

This kind of thing is older than AI; I wrote about it in my 2014 book Beyond Fear. Edward Snowden revealed that the NSA was using cell phone location data to track phones that were habitually near each other.

As bad as Flock is, remember that anyone with broad access to cell phone location data can do the same thing.

There are over a dozen cases around the country where police officers are using the Flock surveillance camera system to obsessively and illegally stalk people.

Alternate link.

The surveillance company Leonardo wants more data:

A surveillance company plans to add sensors to automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) that would mean the devices, as well as capture the license plate of passing vehicles, would also sweep up unique identifiers of mobile phones, wearables, and other Bluetooth-enabled devices in those cars, potentially letting law enforcement identify specific drivers or passengers.

The technology, called SignalTrace, would turn ALPR cameras from devices focused on tracking cars to ones that can more readily track the location of particular people. ALPR cameras have become a commonly deployed technology all across the U.S.; SignalTrace would make some of those cameras capable of collecting much more data.

Yes, it’s bad that more companies are collecting this level of surveillance data. But all of this pales in comparison to the type and quantity of data our smartphones already collect about us.

Alternate link.

Multiple news outlets are reporting on Israel’s hacking of Iranian traffic cameras and how they assisted with the killing of that country’s leadership.

The New York Times has an on the intelligence operation more generally.

Interesting research: “CHAI: Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.”

Abstract: Embodied Artificial Intelligence (AI) promises to handle edge cases in robotic vehicle systems where data is scarce by using common-sense reasoning grounded in perception and action to generalize beyond training distributions and adapt to novel real-world situations. These capabilities, however, also create new security risks. In this paper, we introduce CHAI (Command Hijacking against embodied AI), a new class of prompt-based attacks that exploit the multimodal language interpretation abilities of Large Visual-Language Models (LVLMs). CHAI embeds deceptive natural language instructions, such as misleading signs, in visual input, systematically searches the token space, builds a dictionary of prompts, and guides an attacker model to generate Visual Attack Prompts. We evaluate CHAI on four LVLM agents; drone emergency landing, autonomous driving, and aerial object tracking, and on a real robotic vehicle. Our experiments show that CHAI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art attacks. By exploiting the semantic and multimodal reasoning strengths of next-generation embodied AI systems, CHAI underscores the urgent need for defenses that extend beyond traditional adversarial robustness.

News article.