The Watchers You Fed: Feds, Extractors, Data-Brokers
This talk documents the shared infrastructure connecting federal surveillance purchases, commercial data brokers, and municipal ALPR networks. It will cover the Third-Party Doctrine (United States v. Miller, 1976), the legal basis still used for warrantless federal access to commercial surveillance data; Flock Safety’s ALPR contracts with city governments, including the data retention and federal access terms most council members never read before signing; and Retroactive Omniscience, the capacity of AI-augmented systems to reconstruct a person’s movements and associations from years of data that seemed too mundane to matter when it was collected. The presenter will cover three municipalities where organized residents altered ALPR contract terms through public records requests and council pressure rather than litigation, with the specific mechanics broken down for replication: what to request, what to ask at a meeting, and how to make renewal politically costly. Drawn from research for the forthcoming book The Watchers You Fed: Turn the Lens , this talk is aimed at attendees working in privacy advocacy or municipal policy – and anyone trying to understand how government and commercial surveillance data now move through the same pipeline.
Sunday 1700 Crystal Ballroom
