Across the country, mass surveillance systems keep growing faster than the public can track, and a new investigation shows just how dangerous that expansion has become. Range Media revealed that license plate cameras manufactured by Flock Safety were so loosely secured that a man in Washington state gained access to live feeds used by police departments thousands of miles away. He was able to tap into cameras in multiple states, including Texas, with no permission and no oversight. It is the kind of breach that turns the usual surveillance debate on its head, because it shows that these systems are open doors that can be manipulated and turned on anyone.

Los Angeles is deeply entangled in this wave of surveillance. Even though the city publicly claims that it does not share data with ICE, years of evidence show something very different. ALPR logs, camera footage, and real time policing databases have repeatedly found their way to federal agencies, sometimes through regional systems that LAPD participates in, and sometimes through shared portals that allow ICE to search local data without ever asking the city directly. When law enforcement builds tools designed to circulate information across jurisdictions, the promise of local sanctuary protections collapses the moment a license plate scan enters the network.

The secrecy around LAPD’s expanding real time crime centers makes the threat even clearer. Stop LAPD Spying filed a public records request asking for information on these surveillance hubs. LAPD responded that no such centers existed. Eighteen days later, an officer admitted to a community member in Skid Row that a real time crime center had already been operating for a month in Central Division. These centers combine live camera feeds, license plate scans, predictive analytics, and geolocation data into a single command post. They can ingest information from automated license plate readers like the ones used by Flock Safety, and share data outward to other agencies. And they can direct officers in real time to people and places flagged by algorithms. When a department denies their existence while simultaneously operating one in one of the most heavily policed neighborhoods in the city, it becomes impossible to trust anyone about how the data will or will not be shared.

The Range Media investigation exposes just how unstable these systems are once they are in operation. If a random civilian in Washington can access feeds in Texas because Flock’s systems were so poorly secured, we can assume the information gathered in LA is similarly compromised. Once surveillance infrastructure is in place, the data does not stay contained, but moves through networks, getting copied, forwarded, cached, stored. And it feeds into federal systems regardless of what City Hall claims to prohibit. What starts as a tool to find a stolen car can just as easily become a tool to locate a person seeking reproductive care or a family trying to avoid deportation.

In places where abortion is criminalized, Flock data has already been used to track people traveling across state lines. In places like LA being torn apart by federal immigration raids, license plate records have helped ICE identify cars, build cases, and target families. LAPD has a documented record of allowing ICE to search regional databases and is now quietly rolling out new surveillance hubs in Skid Row, concentrating the risks in the same communities that police already treat as expendable. Black, brown, immigrant, unhoused, and working class residents become the test subjects for new policing technology, and the consequences follow them everywhere they go.