From the Community | Stanford must stop supporting the surveillance state

Tim MacKenzie, Chemistry Ph.D. ‘19, worked as a postdoc in the genetics department at Stanford. He is currently on the Steering Committee for the Silicon Valley Democratic Socialists of America.

Cameras tracking your every movement. Data centers storing your location over the past month down to the very moment. The government accessing that information with AI-powered searches without a judicial warrant. These are not dystopian tropes from Orwell’s “1984“ or Yevgeniy Zamyatin’s “We,” but the reality we currently inhabit.

Flock Safety is a private company that sells automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and boasts that over 5,000 communities make more than 20 billion observations each month. Stanford University has multiple Flock cameras on campus. According to deflock.org, there are 40 cameras on campus, including the Stanford Shopping Center, which is the subject of a lawsuit. I believe that Stanford must remove the cameras and cease supporting the surveillance state.

ALPRs are tools of mass surveillance, indiscriminately capturing images of every vehicle that drives past them and storing the data for up to a month or more. It is equivalent to placing a GPS tracking device on each driver’s vehicle, providing time-stamped location data that can be used in warrantless searches to reconstruct your movements as you go about your lives. In California, it has been illegal to share ALPR data with out-of-state agencies since 2016. However, technology users and the companies that purvey these devices have consistently violated these policies. The City of Mountain View tried to protect residents’ data with a strictly crafted data use policy, requiring written approval from the Police Chief and agreement to the city’s policies before access was granted. Even with those safeguards in place, federal agencies and unapproved police departments across the state gained unauthorized access to local data. From August 2024 to December 2025, the Mountain View Police Department (MVPD) performed approximately 25,000 searches of local ALPR data, while outside agencies performed over 3,000,000 searches. In other words, 99.2% of searches were from outside agencies and had nothing to do with preventing crime locally, like proponents of data collection claim.

As an educational institution, Stanford has an obligation to protect the members of its community, including students, staff and visitors. Since Stanford is also essentially its own city, the university must also provide municipal services like policing as laid out in the General Use Permit granted by Santa Clara County. Some may claim installation of ALPRs supports this mission of public safety. After all, didn’t ALPRs help crack the case in the Brown University mass shooting last year? The sobering reality is that more cameras do not prevent violence, or the shooting would never have occurred in the first place. Furthermore, a tip from a person, not an automated camera, was the more critical break in the Brown case. An earlier tip from a campus worker about a suspicious person who turned out to be the shooter was ignored, demonstrating that it is the people who make up the university that keep each other safe, not overreliance on tools of questionable efficacy. Swapping license plates is enough to fool surveillance cameras, which allowed the shooter to murder a professor from MIT the next day. Even after the traumatic experience last winter, members of the Brown community recognize the inefficacy of mass surveillance and are resisting calls for its expansion.

These tools of mass surveillance put public safety at risk. Women seeking healthcare have been tracked by ALPRs in states where abortion has been outlawed. Police have used ALPR data to surveil protestors engaged in protected First Amendment activities. There are repeated instances of faulty AI-powered ALPRs mistakenly flagging vehicles and causing innocent people to be held at gunpoint. These mistakes have left to situations where a 12-year-old was handcuffed or a Black man was mauled by a police dog.

ALPR cameras can facilitate the extralegal overreach currently pursued by the government. There are countless examples of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection gaining access to ALPR data. Marimar Martinez, a woman shot five times by ICE, was tracked with historical ALPR data to try to find support for the baseless claim that she was a domestic terrorist. At Columbia University, ICE entered student residences under false pretenses and detained a student. Stanford is no longer flying under the radar of the Trump administration, and must prepare for intrusion into its educational and administrative policies. Utilizing tools that federal agencies have repeatedly abused is irresponsible and a dereliction of Stanford’s duty to protect its community members.

Luckily, the tide is turning against the surveillance state here in the Bay Area. Both San Jose and Oakland are facing lawsuits for warrantless searches of ALPR data. Santa Cruz became the first city in California to cancel their Flock contract in January, followed soon after by Los Altos Hills. The Mountain View City Council unanimously decided to cancel their Flock contract and not seek other ALPR vendors. Most relevant for Stanford, the Santa Clara County Board of Supervisors recently updated its Surveillance Use Policy to forbid the County Sheriff from utilizing Flock ALPRs. This is particularly important because par t of Stanford sits on unincorporated County land and is governed by policies set by the Board of Supervisors. Stanford University Department of Public Safety (SUDPS) derives its authority from a Memorandum of Understanding with the County Sheriff. All campus police officers are “classified as a Santa Clara County Reserve Deputy Sheriff” and therefore must abide by the policies set by the Board of Supervisors. 

Continuing to operate Flock cameras on Stanford’s campus is not just a threat to the safety of students and workers the university has an obligation to protect. It is also a violation of law and policy governing the policing power of SUDPS. Stanford must cease operating ALPRs, terminate its contract with Flock Safety and remove the cameras from campus.

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