Over 65 school districts have bought or tested artificial intelligence gun detection from a variety of companies since 2018, spending a total of over $45 million, much of it coming from public coffers, according to an investigation by The Intercept.

“Private companies are preying on school districts’ worst fears and proposing the use of technology that’s not going to work,” said Stefanie Coyle, deputy director of the Education Policy Center at the New York Civil Liberties Union, or NYCLU, “and may cause many more problems than it seeks to solve.”

In December, it came out that Evolv, a publicly traded company since 2021, had doctored the results of their software testing. In 2022, the National Center for Spectator Sports Safety and Security, a government body, completed a confidential report showing that previous field tests on the scanners failed to detect knives and a handgun. When Evolv released a public version of the report, according to IPVM and underlying documents reviewed by The Intercept, the failures had been excised from the results. Though Evolv touted the report as “fully independent, there was no disclosure that the company itself had paid for the research. (Evolv has said the public version of the report had information removed for security reasons.)

Five law firms recently announced investigations of Evolv Technology — a partner of Motorola Solutions whose investors include Bill Gates — looking into possible violations of securities law, including claims that Evolv misrepresented its technology and its capabilities to it.

“When you start peeling back the onion on what the technology actually does and doesn’t do, it’s much different than the reality these companies present,” said Donald Maye at IPVM, a surveillance industry research publication. “And that is absolutely the case with Evolv.”

Evolv told The Intercept it would not comment on any specific situations involving their customers and declined to comment further. (Motorola Solutions did not respond to a request for comment.)

The overpromising of artificial intelligence products is an industry-wide problem. The Federal Trade Commission recently released a blog post warning companies, “Keep your AI claims in check.” Among the questions was, “Are you exaggerating what your AI product can do?”

At an investor conference in June 2022, Evolv CEO George was asked if the company would have stopped the tragic school shooting in Uvalde, Texas, where 19 students and two teachers were killed. “The answer is when somebody goes through our system and they have a concealed weapon or an open carry weapon, we’re gonna find it, period,” he responded. “We won’t miss it.”

In January, the scanners caught a student trying to enter a high school with a handgun in Guilford, North Carolina. Subsequently, an Evolv spokesperson told WFMY News that their systems had uncovered 100,000 weapons in 2022. In a presentation for investors in the fourth quarter of 2022, George said the detection scanners, on average, stopped 400 guns per day.

There is little peer-reviewed research, however, showing that AI gun detection is effective at preventing shootings. And in the case of Uvalde, the shooter began firing his gun before even entering the school building — and therefore before having passed through a detector.

“The odds of that happening — someone walks in with a displayed gun — are really, really small,” said Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, a professor of law at American University’s law school and an expert on surveillance. “It just doesn’t make sense that that’s what you’re investing in.”

Even in airports with maximum security protocols, Evolv’s technology has proved to have gaping holes. When an official at Denver International Airport expressed interest in Evolv scanners, he asked a colleague at Oakland International Airport, which uses the machines.

“It is not an explosives detection machine per se,” wrote Douglas Mansel, the aviation security manager in Oakland, in an internal email obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept, “So if an employee (or law enforcement during a test) walks through with a brick of C4” — an explosive — “in their hands, the Evolv will not alarm.” (The Oakland Airport told The Intercept it does not comment on its security program.)

In a BBC interview in 2020, Evolv said the density of metal is one key indicator of a weapon’s presence. But the company firmly denies that their scanners are akin to metal detectors. “We’re a weapons detector, not a metal detector,” George said on a conference call in June 2021. (A large competitor of Evolv is CEIA, which manufactures metal detectors without AI, used in airports and schools.)

Yet in many cases, Evolv hasn’t picked up weapons. And researchers have also highlighted how metallic objects, such as laptops, repeatedly set the system off. “They go through great lengths to claim they are not a metal detector,” said Maye of IPVM. “To the extent to which AI is being used, it’s open to interpretation to the consumer.”

Despite claims by George that the system can scan up to 1,000 students in 15 minutes, in the Hemet Unified School District in California, false alarms slowed ingress to school buildings. The solution, according to Evolv, was to simply encourage educators to let students proceed.

“They only need to clear the threat(s) and not figure out what alarmed the system,” wrote Amy Ferguson, customer manager at Evolv, in an internal email to the school system obtained through a public records request and shared with The Intercept. “I recommended not doing a loop back unless necessary. … Many students were looping back 2 or 3 times.” (The Hemet Unified School District did not respond to a request for comment.)

Across the country in Dorchester County Public Schools in Maryland, the system had 250 false alarms for every real hit in the period from September 2021 to June 2022, according to internal records obtained by IPVM. The school district spent $1.4 million on the Evolv software, which it bought from Motorola.

“It plays an important role in our efforts to keep our School District safe,” the district told The Intercept. “And we plan to expand its use within the District.”

Evolv isn’t the only company making bold claims about its sophisticated weapons detection system. ZeroEyes, a Philadelphia-based AI company, states in contracts that “our proactive solution saves lives.” Founded by Navy SEALs in 2018, the firm uses video analytics and object detection to pick up guns.

ZeroEyes’s website lists the timeline for the Sandy Hook shooting, arguing its technology could have materially reduced the response time. When a gun is visible on camera, an alert gets sent to a “24/7/365 ZeroEyes Operations Center Team,” with people monitoring the feed, who in turn confirm the gun and alert the school and police. It claims to do all of this in three to five seconds.

The human team is key to the group’s system, something critics say belies the weakness of the underlying AI claims. “This is one of the fundamental challenges these companies have. Like if they could fully automate it reliably, they wouldn’t need to have a human-in-the-loop,” said Maye. “The human-in-the-loop is because AI isn’t good enough to do it itself.”

“We have never suggested that AI alone is enough,” Olga Shmukyler, spokesperson for ZeroEyes, told The Intercept. “We would never trust AI alone to determine whether a gun threat is real or fake, nor should anybody else.”

In addition to Philadelphia, the company also has an operations center in Honolulu, Hawaii, “to cater to different time zones.”

ZeroEyes seems determined to overcome its critics and is so far faring well. The company raised $20 million in 2021. According to co-founder Rob Huberty, in a LinkedIn post, the team’s mantra is “F*** you, watch me.”

“We are problem solvers, and this is a difficult problem,” said Shmukyler, the spokesperson. “Without the mentality proposed in that post, we wouldn’t have a solution to offer to school districts around the country.”

During the pandemic, school shootings rose in tandem with a spike in gun violence in general. The sort of panic that ensued can lead to impulsive and ineffective action, according to safety experts.

“We are seeing some school boards and administrators making knee-jerk reactions by purchasing AI weapons detection systems,” said Kenneth Trump, president of National School Safety and Security Services. “Unfortunately, the purchase of the systems appears to be done with little-to-no professional assessment of overall security threats and needs.”

Schools in Colorado and Texas brought weapons detection software from a now-convicted fraudster. Barry Oberholzer developed SWORD in 2018 under the startup X.Labs, registered as Royal Holdings Technologies, which he claimed to be the first mobile phone case providing gun detection software.

Later that year, it was reported that Oberholzer was on the run from over two dozen fraud and forgery charges in South Africa. (Todd Dunphy, a board member of and investor in X.Labs, denied the charges on Oberholzer’s behalf and produced an unverified letter from South African authorities clearing him.)

His SWORD product was endorsed by former high-level U.S. officials.

Former FBI agent James Gagliano, who was listed as an adviser to X.Labs, praised the product as “next generation public safety threat-detection.” Charles Marino, a retired secret service special agent, was listed as the company’s national security adviser.

Marino said he invested in the company but has not been involved for years and did not work on the SWORD project. “He swindled everybody,” Marino told The Intercept, referring to the conspiracy conviction. “Look, you kiss a lot of frogs in this world.”

Gagliano said in an email that he severed ties with Oberholzer after hearing of the fraud charges. “I was as stunned as anyone,” he said. “Have had no contact with him since I learned of his indictment in the Summer of 2021. I was excited about the technology he was seeking to introduce to law enforcement.”

In June 2020, X.Labs announced the rebranding of SWORD to X1, a standing device and “full-featured weapons detection system” in partnership with another firm.

Last month, Oberholzer and his business partner Jaromy Pittario pleaded guilty in federal court to conspiracy to defraud investors and creditors. The Department of Justice accused Oberholzer of posing as Gen. David Petraeus, the former CIA director, while pitching the product to venture capital firms.

“Instead of attracting investors honestly, Oberholzer lied continuously to make his company more appealing to investors,” Manhattan U.S. attorney Damian Williams said in a statement.

None of it deterred the company. Its scanners, despite problems, remain in schools — and X.Labs continues to cultivate new business. “All of the devices that are purchased by clients are in their possession and can be used as they see fit,” Dunphy said. “The company, like last year, is run by the board and is working with parties to complete the last phase of development for the purpose of slowing down mass shootings globally.”

Oberholzer is no longer involved with X.Labs, said Dunphy, the board member, who responded to emails addressed to Oberholzer.

“Mr Oberholzer is a professional helicopter pilot and his comings and goings has nothing to do with X.labs,” Dunphy said, “as he resigned from the company in February 2021.”

There is a reason districts in New York, such as Utica, have been a target of gun detection vendors. Most of this technology is being funded by taxpayer money and, in the Empire State, there is a lot to spend.

Under the Boards of Cooperative Educational Services aid, school purchases get reimbursed based on a school district’s poverty level. Utica City School District, which has a high poverty level, was reimbursed 93 cents on the dollar on the Evolv sale, according to acting superintendent Nolan.

The Boards of Cooperative Educational Services told The Intercept, “ As a coalition of the state’s 37 Boards of Cooperative Educational Services, BOCES of NYS has neither authority nor oversight regarding the budgets, purchases, or reimbursement rates of any school district.” The regional Oneida-Herkimer-Madison Counties BOCES office — which covers the Utica school district — did not respond for comment.

While the district gets most of its money back after the disastrous purchase of the Evolv scanners, “New York state taxpayers are still on the hook for the system,” Nolan said.

The Smart Schools Bond Act, passed in 2014, also set aside $2 billion funding to “finance improved educational technology and infrastructure,” drawing the attention of vendors nationwide.

“Folks in the school security industry got wind that New York State was sitting on this big pot of money that school districts had access to,” said Coyle of the NYCLU. “And that kind of opened the floodgates for companies to try to convince school districts to use that state funding to buy products they don’t need, they don’t know how to use, and are potentially harmful.”

New York isn’t the only state ready to spend a fortune. A 2019 Texas bill allocated $100 million in grants for schools seeking to purchase new equipment.

Federal Covid-19 relief dollars can also be directed to things like school security systems, through the Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief Fund. Companies, including ZeroEyes and a similar firms, advertise how schools can receive a grant for the “development and implementation of procedures and systems to improve the preparedness and response efforts of a school district.”

“We are targeting sales to all states,” Shmuklyer, of Zero Eyes, said. “A lack of funds should not be the reason why a school cannot be proactive in addressing the mass shooting problem.”

Experts argue schools are just a cheap training ground for technology vendors to test and improve their object detection software so that they can eventually sell it elsewhere.

“Part of the reason why these companies are offering schools the technologies at a relatively cheap price point is that they’re using the schools as their grounds for training,” said Ferguson, the American University professor. “And so those schools or students become data points in a large data set that’s actually improving the technology so they can sell it to other people in other places.”

Acting superintendent Nolan himself was told by Evolv the system would get smarter over time with more use. “They keep saying how the artificial intelligence system they use gets refined after more usage, because they collect more data, more information,” he said. “But what’s it going to take, 20 years?”

The lack of regulation leads to a lack of transparency on the use of the data itself. “There’s no protections in place,” said Daniel Schwarz, privacy and technology strategist at NYCLU, “And it raises all these issues around what happens with the data. … Oftentimes, what we’ve caught out is that they actually worsen racial disparities and biases.”

An analysis by the MacArthur Justice Center found that 89 percent of ShotSpotter alerts in Chicago from 2019-2021 turned up no gun-related crime. “Every unfounded ShotSpotter deployment creates an extremely dangerous situation for residents in the area,” according to the report.

There has been extensive reporting on police departments and other agencies’ use of ShotSpotter nationwide — but not schools. Public records show Brockton Public Schools, in Massachusetts, for instance, bought access to the technology for three years in a row. However, the school said the Shotspotter system was bought by the police department, who donated the technology to them, but it was never activated.

“Contrary to claims that the ShotSpotter product leads to over-policing, ShotSpotter alerts allow police to investigate a gunfire incident in a more precise area,” Sara Lattman, a SoundThinking spokesperson, said in a statement to The Intercept. “Additionally, ShotSpotter has maintained a low false positive rate, just 0.5%, across all customers in the last three years.”

For many advocates against gun violence, particularly in schools, gun control measures like an assault weapons ban would go a long way in curtailing the deadly effects of attacks. With Congress failing to enact such policies, experts argue that schools should refrain from turning to shoddy technology to support their students.

“We advise schools to focus on human factors: people, policies, procedures, planning, training, and communications,” said Trump, the National School Safety and Security Services head. “Avoid security theater.”

Vendors, though, continue to emphasize the risk of gun violence and rely on the steady drumbeat of attacks to generate fear in potential clients — and to make sales.

“While recent high visibility attacks at publicly and privately-owned venues and schools have increased market awareness of mass shootings,” said Evolv’s recent annual disclosure report, “if such attacks were to decline or enterprises of governments perceived the general level of attacks has declined, our ability to attract new customers and expand our sales to existing customers could be materially and adversely affected.”

The company even helps schools market the technology to their own communities. In an email from Evolv to the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, a bullet-point list of talking points makes suggestions for how the school system might respond to public queries about the scanners. One of the talking points said, “Security approaches included multiple layers,” adding that “this approach recognizes the reality that no single layer or single technology is 100% effective.”

When reached for comment by The Intercept, Eddie Perez, a spokesperson for the Charlotte-Mecklenburg school district, quoted the talking point verbatim in an emailed response.

That hedged view is out of step with how people in the district itself speak about the system: as an absolute assurance of a gun-free safety. Students in the video produced by the school district said, “You get a certain reassurance that there are no dangerous weapons on campus.”

The result makes for a potentially awkward scenario: A former U.S. official with a robust history of human rights work was being used to cleanse the image of a surveillance company now linked to violations so severe that they incurred U.S. sanctions. Prosper’s remarks in the leaked recording also make him the first person to publicly admit Hikvision’s complicity.

Last month, Hikvision convened a conference on environmental, social, and governance, or ESG, in Sydney, Australia. Prosper, now an attorney for legal and lobbying firm ArentFox Schiff, led an “introduction to human rights compliance” session.

“In the contracts, we saw some concerning language where it said Uyghurs, mosques, and this and that, which would appear that the contracts were looking at groups and not isolated to a criminal, let’s say,” Prosper said in the leaked recording obtained by IPVM and shared with The Intercept. “So it was very general.”

The Chinese government is the controlling stakeholder of Hikvision, with over 40 percent ownership, but the company still calls itself an “independent” corporation. Last month, the U.S. Department of Commerce added five Hikvision subsidiaries from Xinjiang to its trade blacklist, after Hikvision was added to the entity list in 2019. (The U.S. military previously bought Hikvision cameras in violation of the sanctions, according to prior reporting by The Intercept.)

In February, the company sued the U.S. government and the Federal Communications Commission over a ban restricting the sale of Hikvision products in the U.S. (Hikvision, ArentFox, and Prosper did not respond to requests for comment on this story.)

And, what’s more, the locations of the Hikvision police projects in Xinjiang match up exactly with the names of the subsidiaries: Luopu, Moyu, Pishan, Urumqi, and Yutian.

For the review, Prosper and his team received approximately 15,000 pages of documents and read about 5,000 “line by line,” he said. The contracts were explicit about their use against Uygher communities, for example, in Moyu County, with a population of over half a million in southwestern Xinjiang.

“Uyghurs account for about 97%, and most of them believe in Islam,” according to a Hikvision contract obtained by The Intercept. “Moyu County has a strong religious atmosphere since its history, and the enemy social situation is relatively complicated.”

At the conference, Prosper talked about the project in Moyu. “The most concerning on paper was the Moyu project,” he said. “It was most concerning because of the language in the contract. And the language identified terrorism, identified Uyghurs, and then basically explained that they want to look at various facilities and all that, religious facilities.”

Prosper failed to mention that the Moyu project included panoramic cameras for its “re-education” centers — internment camps that Amnesty International has decried as “places of brainwashing, torture and punishment” — as well as a camera at every entrance of Moyu’s nearly 1,000 mosques. Documents have also previously shown that over 300 citizens of Moyu were sent to detention centers.

Human rights groups have been sounding the alarm about the scale and intrusion of the surveillance schemes and data they collect.

“The surveillance systems have increased the speeds and empowered authorities in the ability to control a large population quickly,” said Maya Wang, associate director in the Asia division at Human Rights Watch. “It was really quite unprecedented I think in human history.”

At the conference, while trying to play down Hikvision’s knowledge of data collection, Prosper inadvertently confirmed the sheer scale of the surveillance. “The command centers were basically more a hub, data center,” he said, “where the confirmation will come in and then from there whatever government officials were working there, they will be responsible for disseminating.”

Yet at the ESG conference, Prosper drastically underplayed Hikvision’s role and shifted blame largely to “security issues” and cultural differences — despite large bodies of evidence that illustrate the genocidal nature of persecution against the Uygher population.

“Chinese companies were not getting the second half of the story. They were given the first half that there was terrorism,” he said at the conference. “But they were not hearing about the international community’s complaints about potential abuses or whatever it may be. It was a blind spot.”

According to the company’s own reports, they were well aware of the concerns. The 2019 report announcing the hire of ArentFox, the firm where Prosper is a partner, said, “Over the past year, there have been numerous reports about ways that video surveillance products have been involved in human rights violations. We read every report seriously and are listening to voices from outside the company.”

While Hikvision has disclosed these five Xinjiang police projects in its annual reports for the last four years, they were not disclosed in the most recent 2022 report, published this month.

Prosper seemed more concerned with the company’s use of language than its role in persecution. “We want you to be sensitive to language that may cause you to raise an eyebrow,” Prosper said. “We, in the West, instinctively or initially, everything is human rights, individual rights. … If you want to be a globally respected company, you need to understand that.”

While Prosper’s recording reveals the extent of Hikvision’s complicity for the first time from the company itself, activists are frustrated that the evidence has already been extensively documented.

“A revelation like this should not be necessary for the entire private sector,” Louisa Greve, director of global advocacy for the Uyghur Human Rights Project, told The Intercept, citing the more than 60 reports the project has produced, as well as projects by Amnesty and Human Rights Watch. “People are sent to prison for having a chat with their own mother in the Uygher region. What more does it take?”

“We thought we were just being a partner with the city,” Bill Hayes, the chief operating officer of Legend Communities, which oversees the Rough Hollow Homeowners Association, said at the meeting. “We didn’t go out there thinking we were being Big Brother.”

Lakeway is just one example of a community that has faced Flock’s surveillance without many homeowners’ knowledge or approval. Neighbors in Atlanta, Georgia, remained in the dark for a year after cameras were put up. In Lake County, Florida, nearly 100 cameras went up “overnight like mushrooms,” according to one county commissioner — without a single permit.

In a statement, Flock Safety brushed off the Lake County incident as an “an honest misunderstanding,” but the increasing surveillance of community members’ movements across the country is no accident. It’s a deliberate marketing strategy.

Flock Safety, which began as a startup in 2017 in Atlanta and is now valued at approximately $3.5 billion, has targeted homeowners associations, or HOAs, in partnership with police departments, to become one of the largest surveillance vendors in the nation. There are key strategic reasons that make homeowners associations the ideal customer. HOAs have large budgets — they collect over $100 billion a year from homeowners — and it’s an opportunity for law enforcement to gain access into gated, private areas, normally out of their reach

Over 200 HOAs nationwide have bought and installed Flock’s license plate readers, according to an Intercept investigation, the most comprehensive count to date. HOAs are private entities and therefore are not subject to public records requests or regulation.

“What are the consequences if somebody abuses the system?” said Dave Maass, director of investigations at the Electronic Frontier Foundation. “There are repercussions of having this data, and you don’t have that kind of accountability when it comes to a homeowners association.”

The majority of the readers are hooked up to Flock’s TALON network, which allows police to track cars within their own neighborhoods, as well as access a nationwide system of license plate readers that scan approximately a billion images of vehicles a month. Camera owners can also create their own “hot lists” of plate numbers that generate alarms when scanned and will run them in state police watchlists and the FBI’s primary criminal database, the National Crime Information Center.

“Flock Safety installs cameras with permission from our customers, at the locations they require,” said Holly Beilin, a Flock representative. “Our team has stood in front of hundreds of city council meetings, and we have always supported the democratic process.”

After facing public outrage, the cameras were removed from communities in Texas and Florida, but Flock’s license plate readers continue to rapidly proliferate daily — from cities in Missouri to Kentucky.

“It’s a near constant drumbeat,” said Edwin Yohnka, the director of public policy at the American Civil Liberties Union of Illinois.

With over half of all Americans living in HOAs, experts believe the surveillance technology is far more ubiquitous than we know.

To entice the police, Flock claims it makes neighborhoods 70 percent safer and “quickly arms police” with evidence. And law enforcement officials are easily persuaded by Flock Safety’s promise to reduce crime, which the company stresses is trending dangerously upward. Last April, New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy pledged to spend $10 million to expand the use of automated license plate readers, which would capture and store images in a “centralized database accessible to law enforcement,” to combat an “epidemic in car theft.”

The range of data Flock’s surveillance systems can collect is vast. The company’s “vehicle fingerprint” technology goes beyond traditional models, capturing not only license plate numbers, but also the state, vehicle type, make, color, missing and covered plates, bumper stickers, decals, and roof racks. The data is stored on Amazon Web Services servers and is deleted after 30 days, the company says.

Such detail has helped police catch crime. Dallas police, for instance, said the cameras were a “game changer” and that they have recovered over 200 allegedly stolen vehicles by using the readers. Raleigh police, in North Carolina, recently said that in the first six months after installing the cameras, they alerted officers to 116 wanted people, and 41 people were arrested.

However, studies have found there is no real evidence that license plate readers actually have an effect on crime rates. And what constitutes a crime in one state may not be one in another and can therefore escalate tensions in communities already overtargeted by law enforcement.

In 2017, the ACLU of Northern California found that more than 80 agencies in a dozen states were sharing license plate reader database information — run by Flock’s main competitor Vigilant Solutions (now owned by Motorola) — with U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in violation of state laws or sanctuary policies.

When asked by Vice whether Flock could be used by immigration authorities for deportation, Garrett Langley, the company’s CEO, said, “Yes, if it was legal in a state, we would not be in a position to stop them.” He added, “We give the customers the tools to decide and let them go from there.”

Since the overturning of Roe v. Wade, activists have been concerned about the use of license plate readers to track people accessing abortion in states where it is illegal or crossing state lines to do so.

“Flock does not determine what a crime is,” the company told The Intercept. “We’d expect that local law enforcement will enforce those laws as they are legally or socially required.”

In addition to inundating police departments with marketing emails and appearing at conferences nationwide, Flock also has more intimate tactics to advertise its products.

In the process of being pitched Flock’s cameras, police Chief Todd Radford of Lakeway, Texas, was invited to a private dinner at an upscale restaurant in downtown Fort Worth, where he would have “the opportunity to mingle with other Flock customers as well as with other Chiefs from across the state,” according to an email obtained through a public records request.

It is partly due to the “totally inappropriate relationship” between the company and local law enforcement that the company has expanded so effectively, according to Maass of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Flock’s overall business model involves “co-opting government agencies to promote their product.”

“One of the reasons we work with HOAs is so that they can partner with their local police to provide the evidence needed to solve real crimes, not just post photos of allegedly suspicious individuals on social media,” Flock told The Intercept. “We will all be safer if we work together.”

In generating partnerships with private neighborhoods, however, police capitalize on a loophole in law: getting around constitutional restrictions on data collection. In Washington state, where it’s illegal to track plates, HOAs like Alder Meadow, in a wealthy Seattle suburb, share their access to the technology with local police. And since Fourth Amendment privacy rules do not apply to private citizens, HOA boards are not subject to any oversight.

Back in December 2020, Brown, the police sergeant in Lakeway, was working hard to persuade Texas communities to install the cameras. In an email to Flock’s Rachel Hansen, he said he was “planting a bug in the ear of the HOA for our biggest subdivision.”

Flock also persuaded Lakeway to hold a community engagement event where Brown helped pitch the product to the association. Hansen emailed Brown, “Thank you SO much for joining and handling all of those curve ball questions like a rock star. I really appreciate you taking the time out of your busy schedule to lend a helping hand to Flock and the Rough Hollow Community.”

Not everyone weathered the Flock deal. Around the time of the camera fallout, Radford, the police chief, resigned from the department “upon request.”

“The Flock camera situation was one of several data points in which the former chief exceeded the scope of his authority,” Kilgore, the Lakeway mayor, told The Intercept. “He also failed to develop formal internal controls or policies on who could access or use the data from Flock.”

The strategy used in Lakeway to sell the Flock system to its community was replicated elsewhere. Numerous police departments across the country have also held events for HOAs to learn how to “assist law enforcement to help deter crime” and have a “hand in preventing porch pirates,” The Intercept’s investigation found. Some city police departments, like Saratoga and Ranchos Palos Verdes, both in California, offer grants to help HOAs buy the technology.

In exchange, according to the grant agreements, the HOAs had to provide sheriff’s departments with access to “locate, review and download video recordings and readings.” In the first two rounds of grants in Ranchos Palos Verdes, 14 HOAs received grants for cameras in 2021.

On a personal level, there is also misuse. Last October, in Kechi, Kansas, a police officer was arrested for improperly using Wichita Police Department’s Flock license plate reader technology to track the location of his estranged wife.

“Police aren’t even trained well enough to handle them to protect people’s data,” said Maass. “So how are you supposed to trust the homeowners associations with no law enforcement training, with no data protection training, with no cybersecurity training at all, to manage one of these systems?”

In neighborhood politics, where homeowners associations can already be divisive environments, the license plate scanner can stoke tensions. “Overreaching is problematic,” according to Paula Franzese, a law professor of Seton Hall University and expert in homeowners associations. “Sometimes a governing board charged with enforcing the rules can become too aggressive and too zealous.”

In multiple instances reviewed by The Intercept, HOAs installed the cameras without consulting the wider community. One case led to legal action. In 2021 in Indiana, a homeowner sued the Claybridge Homeowner Association for “trespassing onto her property, cutting down a tree without permission, and installing a surveillance camera without her consent.”

Flock will also sell their license plate readers to individuals without the backing of their HOA. An initiative was set up by a resident in Coral Gate, Florida, that led to the installation of 10 cameras in 2018 — and chaos in the neighborhood. Flock said it was uncommon for the company to sell to private individuals.

“They were very belligerent and opaque in how they went about it,” David Appell, a former resident of Coral Gate, told The Intercept. “They wouldn’t let anyone opt out. The administration was in their hands.”

HOAs often have private Facebook groups to discuss the inner workings of their community. As the license plate readers appeared across Coral Gate, group members turned on one another in the Facebook chat.

“I am very, very concerned of this additional intrusion of my home and life,” one wrote. “Why is this necessary? What is the necessity? What is this detecting? WHY?”

The license plate readers were ultimately removed.

Beyond the police and HOA network, Flock is working to expand its reach on a legislative level. The company has registered nearly 50 lobbyists across a dozen states in the last couple of years, according to public records reviewed by The Intercept.

In California — where some 20 percent of people live in HOAs — the company spent over half a million dollars lobbying for the Organized Retail Theft Grant Program, which passed the state legislature in 2022. The program, open to all police departments, was created to support law enforcement in preventing and responding to “organized retail or motor theft.”

Flock has also been registering lobbyists on a city level. In Providence City Council, in Rhode Island, the firm registered three employees as lobbyists. One, Laura Holland, a senior community affairs manager at Flock, was also registered as a lobbyist in Austin, Texas.

“We support policies that regulate the use of license plate readers, data security and data retention,” Flock said in a statement, “while also increasing public safety with unbiased, objective evidence.”

While some privacy legislation addresses biometric data — currently, Illinois, Texas, and Washington have laws that regulate facial recognition technology — few legislative efforts have been made to statutorily regulate license plate readers.

The result is a patchwork of sometimes ad hoc and wildly varied policies, even within the same state. In 2021, a New York Police Department memo said that the “field-of-view … is strictly limited to public areas and locations.” A four-hour drive away from the city in Elmira, New York, 50 Flock cameras were installed in January, with the city manager saying he was unable to disclose the exact locations.

According to experts, implementing any regulation surrounding license plate readers is difficult.

“There isn’t really a lot of appetite at the state level for privacy protections,” said Yohnka of the ACLU of Illinois. “It’s a little bit like trying to stuff the genie back into the bottle.”

Others explain that at the heart of Flock’s sales pitch is how they straddle the intersection of security and privacy. For example, the company collects copious amounts of data — but only for 30 days. They share that data — but only with law enforcement.

“They’re able to explain that they don’t share data, but at the same time, extract use functionality of leveraging the data across law enforcement agencies,” said Donald Maye of IPVM, a surveillance industry research group. “They’re really having their cake and eating it too.”

And yet, as Flock continues to install its license plate readers and its surveillance network continues to expand across the country, some residents are suspicious about just exactly what the cameras are watching — and for whom.

“If you drive from your house to Dripping Springs to get some fine barbeque, you have become a subject to the system,” Kilgore, the mayor, said at the Lakeway City Council meeting, referring to the installation of the cameras in his community. “They can probably find out what you ordered on the way back.”

It never happened. Shell refused to cooperate, and the situation has only gotten worse, with 55 oil spills in the last 12 years. Amnesty International called the Niger Delta region “one of the most polluted places on earth.”

On January 27, over 11,300 residents from Ogale — which has a population of approximately 40,000 — and 17 local organizations, including churches and schools, filed individual claims at the High Court in London against Shell. With the existing claims from the Bille community, this brings the total number against the oil company to over 13,650.

The Ogale and Bille locals attribute environmental destruction, death, and diseases to the repeated spills. Infants in the Niger Delta, for instance, are twice as likely to die in their first month of life if their mothers live near an oil spill, according to a study published in 2017.

Local leaders are distraught and angry. “As we speak, oil is spilling in my community every day, people are dying,” King Emere Godwin Bebe Okpabi, leader of the Ogale community, told The Intercept.

In 2016, a year after the initial legal case got underway, Okpabi flew to London for a High Court hearing with plastic bottles full of contaminated water from Ogale, visibly covered in an oil sheen.

In Bille, Chief Bennett Dokubo, a community leader and claimant, told The Intercept that drinking water has caused massive cholera outbreaks. The only way to avoid disease is buying bottled water from the city, which is expensive.

“If you don’t have money, you can’t drink water,” he said. “It’s like we are living in a desert, while we are living on the water.”

Shell has so far managed to brush aside accountability. In February 2021, though, the Niger Delta communities secured a procedural win: The U.K. Supreme Court unanimously ruled that there was a “good arguable case” that Shell plc, the U.K. parent company, was legally responsible for the pollution caused by its Nigerian subsidiary, Shell Petroleum Development Company, and that the case would proceed in the English courts.

The following November, Shell filings claimed the company had no legal responsibility to deal with the consequences of spills. The oil giant contended that any legal claim must be brought within five years of any specific spill, even if a cleanup never took place. Shell also claimed that only the Nigerian regulatory authorities have the power to force them to clean up; those authorities, however, are chronically under-resourced. (The Nigerian government could not be reached for comment.)

“The overwhelming majority of spills related to the Bille and Ogale claims were caused by illegal third-party interference, including pipeline sabotage, illegal bunkering and other forms of oil theft,” said Tara Lemay, a Shell spokesperson, in a statement to The Intercept. “Irrespective of cause, SPDC has and will continue to clean up and remediate areas affected by spills from its facilities or pipeline network.”

Since 1956, when Shell first discovered oil in the Niger Delta, extractive industries have pumped the region for profits and bolstered a rapidly growing Nigerian economy. Nigeria is now Africa’s largest oil producer, and Shell continues to reap unprecedented financial gains, bringing in over $30 billion in profit in 2022.

“All the money they have made from then until now is blood money,” Okpabi, the king of Ogale, said. “And we are going from courthouse to courthouse.”

Despite the fact that the cleanup would cost Shell a fraction of its profits — the U.N. estimated the first five years would cost around $1 billion — the company has been “incredibly resistant” to any form of public health monitoring or investigations, said Matthew Renshaw, a partner at law firm Leigh Day who represents the claimants in Nigeria.

Renshaw told The Intercept that Shell will not engage with the health dangers and that the company is currently only facing the tip of the iceberg.

“There are literally hundreds of communities that have been impacted by Shell’s oil pollution,” he said, “and could seek to bring legal claims against Shell.”

Leigh Day previously represented the Bodo community in the Niger Delta, on behalf of 15,000 fishers and farmers. In 2015, the suit, in British court, resulted in compensation for loss of livelihoods of approximately $68 million, along with the world’s largest cleanup of oil-impacted mangroves in history.

As the cases proliferate, Shell has moved toward leaving the region. In 2021, the company announced its plan to leave the Niger Delta and sell its onshore oil fields — leaving environmental disaster and any sense of obligation behind.

Last June, though, Shell was forced to suspend sales, complying with a Nigerian Supreme Court ruling that said it had to wait for the outcome of an appeal over a 2019 oil spill, brought in Nigerian court, which stated the company needed to pay the Niger Delta communities nearly $2 billion in compensation.

Leigh Day’s current case is now proceeding to trial to determine whether Shell’s parent company in London, as well as its Nigerian subsidiary, are legally responsible for the harm caused to the communities in the Niger Delta. The trial in the High Court in London is expected to take place in 2024.

Until then, the communities try to remain hopeful about the case.

“We are very hopeful,” said Okpabi, “but time is not on our side.”