Rock Island Needs a Public Board to Watch the Watchers

On May 11, 2026, the Rock Island City Council will vote on a contract with Cellebrite, a foreign company that makes tools to extract the entire contents of a cell phone including texts, photos, location history, deleted files, and app data. A single extraction can produce tens of thousands of pages of data on one person's life.

Cellebrite has faced sustained international criticism for selling its technology to governments that have used it to target journalists, dissidents, and activists from Bahrain to Myanmar to Hong Kong. You can read more here: Should ‘Moral Taint’ Be a Factor in Police Technology Procurement? The Case of Cellebrite

The vote to renew the subscription will likely pass with little discussion. That is concerning.

Rock Island already operates a network of Flock Safety license plate readers and recently added Raven, Flock's acoustic gunshot detection system. Each tool was adopted as a sensible response to a real public safety concern. Each was also adopted with minimal public deliberation. Together, they form a surveillance infrastructure that most residents have never been asked about.

The concerns are not hypothetical. In August 2025, the Illinois Secretary of State found that Flock had allegedly shared Illinois license plate data with federal immigration authorities in violation of state law, prompting Evanston and Oak Park to cancel their contracts. A Texas sherrif's office used Flock to track a woman traveling to Illinois to have an abortion. In Wisconsin, a police officer was charged with using the database to stalk his ex-partner.

Rock Island just renewed its contract and added the new gunshot detection software, Raven. Flock has since announced that Raven microphones will begin detecting "human distress," including screaming — a significant expansion from gunshot detection. Independent studies of similar systems have found that the large majority of alerts do not lead to evidence of a crime. In essence, the technology could evolve to eavesdrop on civilians through ever expanding capabilities in public settings.

Most of Flock surveillance operates without a warrant. License plate readers scan every passing vehicle without individualized suspicion. Microphones run continuously in public spaces. Even Cellebrite, which generally requires a warrant under Riley v. California, is often deployed through consent searches, border exceptions, or expansive warrants that authorize extraction of an entire phone's contents.

The law has not kept up with the technology. Neither has public deliberation.

Rock Island should create a Public Advisory Board on Artificial Intelligence, Surveillance, and Privacy, composed of residents, civil liberties advocates, technologists, and legal experts, with authority to:

• Review every proposed surveillance or AI procurement before it reaches a council vote

• Evaluate vendors on their human rights records and history of misuse, not just cost

• Audit how existing systems are actually being used, and by whom

• Publish annual effectiveness reports measured against the safety outcomes used to justify each tool

• Hold public hearings before new categories of surveillance are introduced

• Recommend retention limits, sharing restrictions, and — when warranted — cancellation

  
  

This is not about opposing police or rejecting useful tools. It is about informed consent. Residents have a right to weigh the trade-offs between privacy and safety before the infrastructure is built, not after. Once cameras are on poles, microphones are recording, and data is flowing into shared regional and federal systems, the conversation about whether the community wanted any of this is essentially over.

The Cellebrite vote on May 11 is an opportunity. The council can mindlessly approve another surveillance contract in another routine meeting, or it can pause long enough to have a discussion about how new and evolving technologies are being introduced into our community and ask whether Rock Island has the oversight structure this moment requires. Useful tools are not enough. Public awareness and knowledge matter. Public buy-in matters. The time to build that structure is now. Let's not wait until the technology has surpassed our collective ability to reign it in.