We’re against these things. Worth saying plainly, and worth explaining why on grounds that have nothing to do with which way you vote.
What it is
Flock Safety sells automated license plate readers to police departments and neighborhood associations. Solar-powered, no wiring. Each one photographs every plate that passes and logs time, location, and vehicle details into a network other agencies can search.
So it isn’t one department’s camera on one intersection. It’s a rolling, retroactive record of where a very large number of ordinary people have driven, assembled one municipal contract at a time, and nobody whose car gets logged was asked first.
The credibility problem
You don’t have to take a position on policing to have a problem with a vendor that keeps telling public bodies things that turn out not to be true. The ACLU published a rundown in July documenting exactly that, and the specifics are worth reading.
In Oshkosh, Wisconsin, Flock’s own chief information security officer told the city council the system did not create a pattern or heat map of an individual’s movements. The council found out the next day that wasn’t accurate. Flock later acknowledged the system does produce heat maps of vehicle location covering up to a month. Oshkosh revoked its approval one day after granting it.
In Loveland, Colorado, Flock told the police chief that federal agencies no longer had access to the data and that the company held no federal contracts. It later had to acknowledge contracts with Customs and Border Protection and the Department of Homeland Security.
The company also ran a blog post titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE?” answering no, while immigration agencies had indirect access through local police departments that were Flock customers. Technically responsive to a narrow question. Not an honest answer to the one people were asking.
And a “Proactive Search Term Tool,” sold as preventing searches on sensitive topics, turned out to be trivially defeated by officers typing something vague. One documented workaround was the search reason “hehehe.”
The one that says the most: Flock claimed it had partnered with the ACLU of New Mexico, and that it worked with groups like the ACLU on system design. The ACLU says that’s false.
What changed, and why
This month Flock announced real restrictions. Every search now has to be logged against a criminal case number, unusual search patterns get flagged with automatic lockouts, and the default retention window drops from 30 days to seven.
Those are genuine improvements. They arrived after sustained investigative reporting and a run of cities walking away, including Santa Cruz in January, Mountain View’s police department in February, El Cerrito in May, and Framingham in June. Washington state has a bill moving that would set actual legal limits on how this data is stored and accessed.
A seven-day retention default and a required case number are the kind of thing you build in on day one if the goal is a system people can trust. Shipping them years later, under pressure, once cancellations became a revenue problem, tells you what the original priority was.
Where we land
Against. Not because surveillance technology is inherently indefensible, and not because of anything a particular agency did with the data.
Against because the entire model is a private company building a searchable history of ordinary people’s movements, selling access to it, and then repeatedly misrepresenting what it does to the councils deciding whether to buy it. The safeguards showed up only when the market forced them. The honesty problem is documented, specific, and came from the vendor’s own mouth in public meetings.
Everything else on this site runs on the same instinct. We keep a NAS instead of renting our media library from a company that can change the terms. We tell people to keep their NAS and their firewall off the open internet. The through-line is who holds the data and what stops them doing whatever they want with it.
A camera network whose default was keep everything, let anyone with an account query it, and explain later is the exact opposite of that. Worth being clear where we stand.
Sources: the ACLU’s July 2026 documentation of Flock’s statements to city councils, ABC News on the policy changes, Deseret News on the scrutiny behind them.