Well said fellow citizen.

To Spokane County Sheriff John Nowels, the installation of automatic license plate reader cameras has been revolutionary.

Flock Safety, a leading supplier of these cameras, brags that they’re used by over 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country, and that Flock technology can go beyond simply recording a license plate. Many of their devices can also identify a car’s make, model, color, dents, roof racks, window stickers and even a dog in a truck bed. It’s a nightmare for privacy advocates, but a dream come true for a sheriff with a tight budget. Nowels said it’s saved hundreds of investigative hours, helped drive down auto thefts and made it easier to prosecute criminals.

“To replicate this with humans, I would have to have 70 people standing on the street 24/7 and they’d have to have perfect recall for everything they took a picture of for 30 days,” Nowels said. “It’s impossible.”

Yet, he’s reluctant to say too much about Flock’s particular vulnerabilities in Washington, knowing the tool could be particularly dangerous in the wrong hands.

“I have concerns about this getting into print, because I don’t want people to get any ideas,” Nowels said.

“Let’s say an ex-boyfriend who’s violent decides that he can’t find his ex, but he wants to, and he thinks she lives here in Spokane, and he happens to know what car she drives,” Nowels said.

In theory, Nowels said, he could submit a records request to Spokane County, asking for every time his ex’s license plate had been recorded by a Flock camera in the past month.

With Flock already under fire for its use in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown, multiple Washington cities have shut down their Flock camera programs, in part because of these public-record concerns.

Washington lags behind nearly half of the states, including Idaho, that have passed laws and regulations around automatic license plate readers. As the 2026 legislative session kicks off in Olympia, legislators have introduced a bill to rein in these cameras by limiting which Flock records the public can access.

The bill would dramatically limit the use of Flock cameras by both the public and law enforcement. The cameras would be banned outside of hospitals, schools, food banks and churches. They couldn’t be used for immigration enforcement or to track protests. And crucially, only academic researchers would be allowed to make public records requests for the data.

But to do that lawmakers must contend with the three conflicting interests: the law enforcement officers who say Flock cameras are vital to protect the public, the civil rights groups who see the cameras as an invasion of privacy, and the public record advocates who worry that cutting off transparency paves the way for government abuse.

“That’s going to remain probably one of the contentious points of the bill and negotiations moving forward,” said Sen. Yasmin Trudeau, D-Tacoma, the bill’s co-sponsor. “There are people that feel very passionately about public records, and they should.”

How the cameras are being used

It was public records, after all, that first revealed information about Flock cameras that outraged civil liberties groups.

In May, independent journalists at the tech site 404 Media revealed that records had uncovered cops across the country conducting Flock camera searches on behalf of Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

Flock boasts about giving their users access to “real-time alerts and footage from partners across the country.” But each search leaves a record — an audit trail — in each city or county’s Flock system. Those audit trails also revealed that Texas deputies had searched cameras across the entire country, including Spokane County, to locate a woman who’d given herself an abortion. Spokane County has since stopped allowing their Flock network to be accessed by nationwide searches.

A University of Washington research project this summer harnessed its own records requests to show that at least eight different Washington state law enforcement agencies had given the U.S. Border Patrol access to Flock images to potentially aid with immigration enforcement. In many states, including Washington, local law enforcement is forbidden from helping federal immigration enforcement.

By the time a Washington superior court ruled on a records case in November that such camera data was open to the public, cities like the Seattle suburb of Redmond had already shut down their Flock cameras. Other cities had to contend with a wave of new records requests. Some were broad and voluminous, creating the kind of financial burden that comes with preserving massive amounts of photos.

Other requests were more targeted. One person requested photos taken of his own license plate.

Another, Jim Leighty, a longtime Spokane area activist, figured out a way to start tracking ICE using the same kind of cameras ICE had used to track others. He sent a public records request to Spokane County asking for all “camera locations, dates and times for Washington License Plate 72715RP” captured during the first dozen days of December.

That vehicle is used by a private company to transport ICE detainees from Spokane to the holding facility in Tacoma, Leighty said, and he wanted to figure out the schedule.

“How often is it coming over?” Leighty said. “That could give us an idea of how active ICE can be in our community.”

Leighty also intended it as a test: If the government was going to violate the right to privacy of average citizens, it only seemed fair to him that citizens could turn around and demand the same sort of information from the government.

Leighty got the record he requested — a single camera hit for the vehicle — after a little less than a month, though he said the county first notified the transport company and called Leighty to ensure that he wasn’t intent on harming anybody.

Meanwhile, Thomas Stotts, who runs the private investigation agency Strategic Intelligence Services, made two Flock camera records requests in his attempt to locate a parent who’d fled another state with their children.

“As soon as you walk out the door, you have no expectation of privacy,” Stotts said.

Washington law gives private detectives some special rights — they are able to look up a person’s license plate number, for instance — but Nowels argues that private detectives don’t have the same level of accountability or training as law enforcement.

“I don’t know anything about their integrity,” Nowels said. “I’d like to think most people are ethical and moral, but there’s plenty of people who aren’t. … That’s my issue with that information available to just about anybody.”

For now, Tony Dinaro, the public records officer for Spokane County, said the county has been attempting to use the existing law to prevent known abusers from looking up specific license plates, by cross-referencing the records requests with a list of all the people who have had protective orders leveled against them.

Since Washington’s records laws currently allow the government to decline to release records if the disclosure could endanger a crime victim’s physical safety, Dinaro said, the county attorneys felt they were “definitely on solid ground legally” to deny such a request from an abuser.

“That’s our red line,” he said.

The trouble is, requests can come in anonymously. A stalker could simply refuse to leave his name. In those cases, Dinaro said, the county plans to contact the owner of the vehicle being tracked, giving them a chance to go to court and say, “I am being stalked … and I don’t want this information released.”

Shuttering cameras

Local governments face another big problem. Flock, as a default, deletes the images off their servers after 30 days. But what if someone makes a last-minute request to the city on Day 29? If the requested pictures get deleted before the city can ask Flock to preserve them, the city could be fined for violating the state’s transparency laws.

Trudeau’s bill seeks to fix that vulnerability by cutting off almost all public records access. The bill would slash the amount of time most Flock images could be preserved from 30 days to just three.

Nowels worries that such legislative restrictions could make the cameras “completely useless.”

Trudeau is well known for supporting measures to restrain law enforcement, including a controversial restriction on vehicle chases. But this latest bill, she notes, is co-sponsored by Sen. Jeff Holy, R-Cheney, a former detective who spent 22 years with the Spokane Police Department.

“Everyone is happy and unhappy about my current draft, which means we’re probably on a good path to compromise,” Trudeau said.

Holy sees the bill as an example where a conservative and a progressive can find common ground: libertarianism. Both of them worry about how a tyrannical government might abuse its powers.

The proposed bill requires governmental agencies to keep their own logs tracking Flock usage. Yet the fact that it also cuts off the underlying public access to the data in those logs has some public records advocates wary.

“Some of the board members have said, as long as the government is receiving information, that should be considered public record,” said Collette Weeks, executive director of the Washington Coalition for Open Government, an organization that advocates for public transparency.

Weeks said that the bill “raises 100 questions for me, with each question leading to 100 more.”

And Leighty, the Spokane activist, argued that the bill was “locking citizens out, but not actually protecting citizens.”

It isn’t clear whether a license plate number included as part of a Flock audit log would still be considered a public record.

“It’s really just a question of balancing transparency with privacy,” said Tee Sannon, technology policy program director with the American Civil Liberties Union of Washington.

The ACLU has warned that audit log data itself is often not enough to identify abuses of the technology and can be vague and misleading. Records first obtained by Range Media show that more than a dozen Flock searches were made by Spokane County sheriff’s deputies in November with no recorded explanation logged other than the word “investigation.” (Nowels told InvestigateWest that he’s urged his deputies to be more specific with their Flock requests.)

So far, the most prominent examples of Flock technology being used for stalking have not involved records requesters — but law enforcement officers.

A police chief of a city outside of Atlanta, Georgia, was arrested in November for allegedly using the city’s license-plate readers to stalk and harass people. In Kansas, a police chief used Flock cameras to track the license plates of his ex-girlfriend and her boyfriend over 200 times across five months, according to news reports, while a police lieutenant in a neighboring city used the cameras to track his estranged wife.

Nowels is well aware that, in the hands of an unethical sheriff or officer, the technology can be used for evil ends.

“I’ll be the first one to stand up and say, ‘If you can’t use this tool appropriately and ethically and lawfully, it needs to go away,’” Nowels said. “It just does.”

Either way, when Washington state legislators drive near the Capitol in Olympia this month, their license plates won’t be recorded by Flock. Last month, Olympia shut off its Flock cameras at the police department’s request, due to the concerns that had been revealed through public records.

This story was originally published by InvestigateWest and distributed through a partnership with The Associated Press.

NORFOLK — A federal judge on Wednesday challenged the argument by an attorney for a Northern Virginia privacy rights organization suing the city of Norfolk over its Flock Safety surveillance system.

U.S. District Judge Mark S. Davis appeared skeptical over the assertion that Flock cameras are tracking residents “in the whole of their movements” — which is crucial language that’s been used by the U.S. Supreme Court in prior cases.

In their federal lawsuit, local residents Lee Schmidt and Crystal Arrington contend the Norfolk Police routinely violate their constitutional rights with the city’s 176 Flock cameras and the database of pictures the cameras amass. Searching the system without a warrant, they maintain, is a violation of their Fourth Amendment right to be free from unreasonable searches.

But Davis said the number of times Schmidt’s license plate was captured by a Flock camera, or about four times per day, doesn’t appear to be enough.

“You have a few hits by Mr. Schmidt on a particular day,” Davis told attorneys suing Norfolk. “But you don’t have anything that will track the whole of his movements … That’s one of my biggest problems with your argument.”

The Supreme Court has opined that people’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” can be violated if the whole of their movements are tracked.

In other words, while people might believe it’s reasonable to be occasionally photographed by public camera systems, they draw the line at being tracked going to the store, to work, church and visiting relatives.

Aside from the four times a day that Schmidt’s license plate was captured on the system, there were several times a day that a partial plate was captured that could have been tied to him with further data about the car.

Davis noted the Flock system is unlike cell phone location data, which courts have ruled require a search warrants for police to access. He said it’s also unlike a Baltimore program that tracked people by plane, also ruled a privacy violation.

It’s also different, he said, “from a police officer tailing you, following you for a certain amount of time.”

But Michael Soyfer, an attorney for Institute for Justice who is suing Norfolk, said that lots of information about people’s whereabouts can be gathered with the Flock data.

“You can glean insights about people’s habits and routines from the Flock data,” he said. For a system to be illegal, he said, the police “don’t need to have an 8 x 10 glossy photograph of everywhere you’ve been.”

He noted that when Arrington visited her father, police could draw inferences from the Flock cameras in the area about “when and how long she is visiting him.”

In a court filing, the Institute for Justice said that the Norfolk police have conducted more than 200,000 searches, with no oversight on the justification for the searches and cursory “audits” only beginning last May.

But Justin Raphael, a San Francisco attorney representing the city of Norfolk at Wednesday’s hearing, said that for a technology to be illegal, it must truly track people.

“They’re not able to show continuous tracking,” he said.

To be considered “tracking,” Raphael asserted, the Flock system would have to say “where the car started, where it ended and what it’s doing in between.” It’s not enough, he said, to say “where they were at this hour or that day.”

Though an expert witness for the plaintiffs was able to say that Arrington was “in the general area” of her father’s home on a particular date, Raphael said, the witness was not able to go beyond that.

There are now more than 700 Flock cameras in Hampton Roads.

The cameras — typically mounted on 12-foot poles — take pictures of all cars that pass. The system logs not only license plates, but a vehicle’s make, body type and color, and such features as bike racks, dents and bumper stickers.

Detectives can query the database to find out which vehicles passed the cameras at certain times and places. The data is stored for 21 days and is widely shared among police agencies.

Police rave about the Flock cameras in helping solve a wide range of crimes, but privacy advocates are increasingly concerned.

Aside from casting doubt on Flock’s ability to “track” people at current levels of deployment, Judge Davis on Wednesday noted that the Virginia General Assembly took up the issue last year. Lawmakers passed a state law in 2025 that implements guardrails on police usage of the systems.

The legislative process in Virginia, Davis said, “allows for the public to be heard and weigh in on how technology is being gathered and used.”

The process of drafting legislation, he said, helps to arrive at the public’s “reasonable expectation of privacy” in a particular matter.

Under the state’s resulting rules, for example, police can use Flock only for law enforcement purposes and can’t share the data with out of state or federal agencies without a court order. Police agencies must provide detailed information to the public annually on how they use the systems.

Significantly, lawmakers did not require that police officers get warrants to use the systems.

The counterargument is that just because the General Assembly allows something doesn’t make it right.

Soyfer asserted that ever since the nation’s founding, the judicial system serves as a “check” on any violations of “people’s security in their persons.”

At that time, he said, the police had “a very limited ability” to search people without a judge’s involvement.

“This was guaranteeing people to be free from permeating police pressure,” Soyfer said.

Wednesday’s hearing was regarding motions from each side for summary judgement — in other words, motions asking Davis to decide the case without a trial.

If Davis denies both motions, the trial can move forward as expected in February. But if he grants Norfolk’s motion, the trial is off.

Davis said the sides would hear from him soon on a ruling.

After the hearing, Norfolk Chief Deputy City Attorney Adam Melita expressed satisfaction with how it went.

“It went as well as we expected,” he said. “It gives us the confidence that the court is giving the case the tough analysis that it deserves.”

Soyfer sounded a hopeful note despite Davis’ skepticism.

“The judge was clearly very engaged,” he said. “He had looked at both of the parties’ arguments in detail. He asked fair and tough questions of each side. So we’re hopeful, but we don’t know which way it will ultimately roll.”

Soyfer noted that this was the first federal constitutional challenge to Flock Safety cameras to get this far in court.

“This is the first case anywhere across the country that has gotten past the initial stage, has gotten discovery, has gotten to summary judgment — almost all the way to trial —challenging the use of license plate readers to track ordinary people’s movements for weeks at a time.”

In the meantime, Soyfer said, “we’re going to prepare for trial — prepare to question witnesses and prepare to have our clients testify.”

If Davis rules against the plaintiffs, Soyfer said, the Institute for Justice will file an appeal to the U.S. 4th Circuit Court of Appeals — and will take it even beyond that to the U.S. Supreme Court if necessary.

“We plan to pursue this issue the whole way,” Soyfer said.

Peter Dujardin, 757-897-2062, pdujardin@dailypress.com

SANTA CRUZ – The Santa Cruz City Council voted 6-1 to terminate the city’s contract with Flock Safety, the company that provides automated license plate cameras to Santa Cruz, Capitola and Watsonville along with other jurisdictions across the country, at its meeting Tuesday afternoon.

Santa Cruz first signed its contract with Flock in 2024. Over the past several months, controversy around and opposition to the company has spread as reports about the use of the cameras’ data has emerged. Demands to cease the use of Flock cameras grew when Santa Cruz police Chief Bernie Escalante confirmed that the city’s Flock data had been accessed by out-of-state agencies. Now, the City Council has voted to end the contract with Flock and directed city staff to seek out alternative options for automated license plate readers.

Councilmembers Shebreh Kalantari-Johnson, Gabriela Trigueiro, Scott Newsome, Susie O’Hara and Renee Golder, along with Mayor Fred Keeley, voted in favor of terminating the Flock contract. Councilmember Sonja Brunner was the sole vote against the motion.

O’Hara, who prepared the motion with Kalantari-Johnson and Golder, presented the case for ending the Flock contract. O’Hara outlined the issues Santa Cruz has had with Flock, including reports that the chief executive officer of Flock had referred to anti-Flock groups as “terroristic.” She also discussed the community’s fears that the Trump administration would use data from Santa Cruz for immigration enforcement purposes and said that the Flock platform had repeatedly created opportunities for Santa Cruz’s data to be used in ways the city never intended.

“The question isn’t whether we trust our own intent or even our own officers’ intent,” O’Hara said. “It’s whether we can guarantee our data won’t be used in ways that conflict with Santa Cruz values and create fear in our community. Right now, we do not believe we can, and that is why termination is necessary.”

Brunner presented a substitute motion during deliberation that would maintain and renew the city’s contract with Flock, but would put more safety measures in place. Many of these were already being considered by the city and police department, including limiting data sharing to nearby jurisdictions and having those jurisdictions sign attestations that they would use data only in alignment with Santa Cruz’s values. The motion also included regular reviews of the system and ways to continue reviewing the use of the technology.

Brunner said she felt a responsibility to maintain public safety, and that her motion was about creating a framework to use license plate cameras while addressing the community’s concerns.

Brunner’s motion did not receive a second from any other member of the council, and died on the floor. O’Hara and Kalantari-Johnson did, however, thank Brunner for speaking her mind and agreed that regulations similar to those in the substitute motion would be necessary if the city were ever to consider an alternative to Flock.

Several members of the council, including Golder and O’Hara, expressed that the decision to terminate was a difficult one. Both councilmembers acknowledged that the cameras had helped the Santa Cruz Police Department solve crimes, including recovering stolen vehicles and identifying suspects in some burglaries and violent crimes. They clarified that the motion to end the Flock contract was not a statement against the police department and expressed their gratitude to the Santa Cruz Police Department. Still, they said, the privacy concerns and lack of community trust in Flock outweighed the benefits to the police department.

Over 20 people, both in person and over Zoom, spoke out against the use of Flock cameras during the meeting. Among them were Peter Gelblum, chair of the Santa Cruz County Chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union, and Jill Clifton from the Get the Flock Out group. Most of the people who spoke against Flock also opposed the use of any automated license plate reader technology in the future. Some expressed concerns that the technology was easy to hack, which could lead to stalking or escalation of domestic violence. A few other concerns included that the cameras capture people’s faces, and that Flock Safety has not proven itself to be a trustworthy company. One of the most prominent fears was that the cameras could be used to track down immigrants, despite Santa Cruz being a sanctuary city.

“Continuing to use the Flock cameras is irreconcilably inconsistent with Santa Cruz being a sanctuary city,” Gelblum said. “If we really mean that, you can’t have these cameras here.” Sgt. Josh Trog, president of the Santa Cruz Police Officers’ Association, also spoke at the meeting. He discussed the ways in which the Flock system had helped the Santa Cruz Police Department solve crimes more efficiently, and asked the council not to terminate the contract. He added that the department faces staffing challenges, and that losing effective tools can cause issues with morale and retention.

“We’re not asking for unchecked authority,” Trog said. “We’re asking to continue using a proven investigative tool within clear boundaries with accountability, transparency and oversight.”

Escalante answered some of the council’s questions during the meeting. In his answers, he said that the Flock cameras only capture a photo of the back of each car that passes by them. This statement is contrary to many claims that the cameras constantly livestream an audio and video feed, capturing pedestrians’ and drivers’ faces. Last month, journalists from 404 Media used Flock cameras to track themselves in real time on livestream video on the internet.

Escalante also said that Flock had never shared data from Santa Cruz without the city’s knowledge. Santa Cruz owns its own data collected by Flock cameras, Escalante said, and is in control of which other agencies to share it with. When data was searched by out-of-state agencies, it was because Santa Cruz — along with several other California communities, including Capitola — was “unwittingly” opted into a nationwide sharing portal, according to Escalante. This data sharing was against state law, and Flock disabled the setting in California on Feb. 11, 2025.

In November, Santa Cruz opted out of the system’s statewide sharing portal, as well. This meant that any outside agencies would have to get express permission to access Santa Cruz data. The police department began work on an attestation form that agencies would be required to sign if they were to have access to the Santa Cruz database, stating that they would operate in alignment with the city’s values.

Finally, Escalante discussed other measures that have recently been put in place to safeguard the Flock system. Flock prohibited searches in California that include terms such as “immigration,” “ICE” or “border patrol,” according to Escalante and Santa Cruz City Manager Matt Huffaker. Plus, agencies must now select a reason for the search from a drop-down menu of set options when they search Flock. Before, agencies could type anything into the box to justify their search, though Santa Cruz has always required a case number to be associated with each search, Escalante said.

Keeley addressed Escalante and the rest of the police department right before the vote. “Frankly, this is not about you. This is about a company we can’t trust,” he said. “We trust you, we don’t trust them.” Keeley said that he had been against the Flock system since the beginning, citing the fact that he voted against the contract back in 2024. He directed that city staff could go ahead and search for a replacement for Flock’s automated license plate readers, but expressed doubt that any system would meet Santa Cruz’s standards.

“I will probably vote against that, if that ever arrives here during my remaining time as mayor on the City Council,” Keeley said.

The Santa Cruz Police Department has already discontinued its use of Flock cameras, said Erika Smart, communications manager for the city of Santa Cruz. The police department is coordinating with Flock to remove the city’s eight cameras, and expects them to be taken down within a few weeks.

“This decision does not change the Police Department’s core mission, but it does remove a tool that had proven investigative value and could result in certain investigations requiring more time and resources, or going unsolved,” Smart wrote to the Sentinel in an email.

Huffaker added that though the Flock system was useful, the city prioritizes transparency and community trust.

“Public safety includes both effective investigations and protecting civil liberties,” Huffaker wrote in an email to the Sentinel. “While ALPRs (automated license plate readers) can be a useful tool, community trust and safety remain our top priority. That is why the City is ending the current contract and committing to only consider future use if a solution can be demonstrated to be truly safe, secure, and aligned with Santa Cruz values.”

The vote was met with applause and cheers from the crowd, with many audience members shouting “Thank you!” as they filed out of the City Council chambers.

NORFOLK, Va. — A federal judge will hear arguments Wednesday in a case challenging Norfolk's Flock camera surveillance program, with two residents claiming the system violates their Fourth Amendment rights.

The lawsuit, filed by neighbors from Norfolk and Portsmouth, argues that the city's 172 Flock cameras constitute warrantless surveillance that infringes on constitutional protections against unreasonable searches.

Flock cameras are designed to photograph vehicles and identify license plates. Local law enforcement says the technology has helped solve crimes by providing investigators with vehicle identification data.

The plaintiffs' main concern centers on police department access to the camera database without obtaining warrants first.

"We look forward to persuading the court tomorrow that the city's warrantless surveillance of every driver in Norfolk violates the Fourth Amendment. Our clients and all Hampton Roads residents deserve to be free from this unconstitutional dragnet. If the court does not decide the case after tomorrow's hearing, then we look forward to proving the city's constitutional violations at trial next month," Michael Soyfer, Institute for Justice Attorney said.

Flock Safety, the company behind the camera system, has previously defended the technology's legality.

"License plates are issued by the government for the express purpose of identifying vehicles in public places for safety reasons. Courts have consistently found that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in a license plate on a vehicle on a public road, and photographing one is not a Fourth Amendment search," the company said.

The company argues that courts have established no reasonable expectation of privacy exists for license plates displayed on public roads, since governments issue them specifically to identify vehicles for safety purposes.

If the judge does not rule after Wednesday's hearing, the case is scheduled to go to trial during the first week of February.

Full story

After residents of a Virginia town complained about AI-powered license plate reading cameras in their community, the head of the company that provided them to the local police department pushed back. His message was defiant.

“Let’s call this what it is: Flock, and the law enforcement agencies we partner with, are under coordinated attack,” Garrett Langley, chief executive of Flock Safety, wrote in an unsolicited email to Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams. “The attacks aren’t new. You’ve been dealing with this forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”

Langley’s defiance backfired.

Last month, Staunton joined the growing list of cities that are canceling contracts with Flock, amid a growing public backlash over the surveillance technology’s expansion.

City council meetings from Washington state to Massachusetts have been filled with concerned residents, many of whom accuse their local officials of entering into contracts that allow unwarranted spying without their input or knowledge.

Williams, the longtime chief in Staunton, a town of about 25,000 in the Shenandoah Valley where Flock installed six license plate reading cameras in 2024, rejected Langley’s assertion that law enforcement is under attack.

“What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes,” Williams wrote to Langley. “These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders.

“In short,” he said, “it is democracy in action.” Video spurs scrutiny

More than 80,000 Flock cameras are said to be in use throughout the U.S. Flock’s customers include an estimated 5,000 law enforcement agencies and 1,000 corporations.

Scrutiny of the company has intensified since a YouTube video revealed how live feeds from more than 60 cameras were exposed to the open internet.

The video has been viewed more than 953,000 times. Its producer, technologist Benn Jordan, told Straight Arrow News that he sent an email thanking Williams for what he saw as a rational response to Flock’s CEO.

Jordan also expressed concern over Langley’s email, which he believes may have been sent out en masse.

“I realized that Garrett Langley’s original email was unsolicited and impersonal, coming from a ‘no_reply’ address, which suggests that this kind of message is going out to large amounts of law enforcement agencies around the country,” Jordan said. “Intentionally misleading law enforcement and trying to get them to ‘join the fight’ against people critical of your company is incredibly reckless and dangerous.”

“I’ve already had police show up to my house after taking video footage of Flock Safety cameras,” Jordan continued. “How will they approach my house if they have reason to believe that I’m part of a ‘lawless coordinated attack’ on them?”

SAN reached out to Flock with specific questions about Langley’s email and the contract cancellation in Staunton. The company replied only with a link to a page on its website outlining its privacy and ethics guidelines. A clash of values

In Staunton, Williams said the Flock cameras had helped officers locate missing and wanted persons, recover stolen vehicles and identify suspects in crimes.

However, the damage from Langley’s email could not be undone. After Williams met with the city manager and city council to discuss Langley’s remarks, they decided to end the contract with Flock.

In a statement, the city said that Langley’s “narrative does not reflect” Staunton’s values.

“The Staunton Police Department reported numerous successes utilizing this technology,” the statement said. “Unfortunately, the city does not agree with the assessment as detailed by the CEO of Flock Safety.”

The city says it is currently coordinating with Flock to finalize the contract’s termination and to turn off and remove all license plate reading cameras.

‘A new era’

The situation in Staunton is similar to a growing number of others, including in Flagstaff, Arizona, which terminated its contract with Flock in December after a month of pushback from local residents. Despite efforts by police to ease concerns by outlining policy guardrails, the Flagstaff City Council ultimately voted unanimously to end the partnership.

Jan Carlile, a local resident who supported terminating the contract, said during public comment that the potential privacy ramifications were too much to bear.

“I admire and respect the efforts of our police department to try to do the very best they can to protect our safety, and until the advancement of AI and frankly the troubling efforts by our current national administration, both of those can potentially very seriously undercut our privacy as citizens,” Carlile said. “I would not likely have been concerned about the use of cameras as a tool for public safety [in the past], but we are in a new era.”

Cambridge, Massachusetts, initially paused the use of 16 cameras in October. But city officials canceled their contract entirely after it was revealed that Flock had installed two additional cameras without the city’s knowledge.

“Concerns about Flock were substantiated,” said city spokesperson Jeremy Warnick. “Due to this material breach of our trust and the agreement, the city terminated its contract with Flock Safety.”

In Evanston, Illinois, a similar series of events unfolded. After the city terminated its contract in late August and deactivated 19 cameras, Flock began reinstalling cameras across the city, seemingly unbeknownst to local officials and residents. The city responded in September by issuing a cease-and-desist order against Flock, which said that it would uninstall the cameras.

The controversy came around the same time that an audit by the Illinois Secretary of State found that Flock had violated state law by allowing U.S. Customs and Border Protection access to data collected by its license plate-reading cameras. Flock refuted the charge.

Washington state has also been a hotbed for backlash against Flock. The cities of Redmond and Lynwood deactivated their cameras in November while reevaluating their contracts after complaints from residents. The City Council in Mountlake Terrace unanimously canceled its contract in November, while the capital city of Olympia uninstalled 15 cameras and canceled its pilot program with Flock in December.

APPLETON (WLUK) -- Menasha police officer Cristian Morales was charged Friday with one count of misconduct in office for allegedly using a license plate recognition system to track his ex-girlfriend.

Morales, 31, made an initial court appearance Friday afternoon, where a $10,000 cash bond was set. Conditions include not accessing Flock camera systems or working as an officer. A preliminary hearing date was not immediately set, but is expected to be held within 10 days.

According to the complaint, Morales’ ex-girlfriend complained he had used the Flock system to monitor her location. A review of Morales’ activity showed he tried to use it five different times for her vehicle in early October.

“Cristian indicated that "desperation, and bad judgment, combined with a lack of sleep", contributed to his decision to use Flock. He also indicated he knew his decision to use Flock was wrong, but it was out of a pure moment of "desperation and lack of judgment,” the complaint states.

The Menasha Police Department said Morales was placed on administrative leave.

Separately, a civil filing seeking a temporary restraining order in a domestic abuse case was filed against Morales Thursday by an unnamed petitioner. A hearing is set for Jan. 21 in that case.

Love the other cops take...."this is called democracy in action" then shortly after cancels the cities contract.

I am standing on the corner of Harris Road and Young Street outside of the Crossroads Business Park in Bakersfield, California, looking up at a Flock surveillance camera bolted high above a traffic signal. On my phone, I am watching myself in real time as the camera records and livestreams me—without any password or login—to the open internet. I wander into the intersection, stare at the camera and wave. On the livestream, I can see myself clearly. Hundreds of miles away, my colleagues are remotely watching me too through the exposed feed. Flock left livestreams and administrator control panels for at least 60 of its AI-enabled Condor cameras around the country exposed to the open internet, where anyone could watch them, download 30 days worth of video archive, and change settings, see log files, and run diagnostics.

Unlike many of Flock’s cameras, which are designed to capture license plates as people drive by, Flock’s Condor cameras are pan-tilt-zoom (PTZ) cameras designed to record and track people, not vehicles. Condor cameras can be set to automatically zoom in on people’s faces as they walk through a parking lot, down a public street, or play on a playground, or they can be controlled manually, according to marketing material on Flock’s website. We watched Condor cameras zoom in on a woman walking her dog on a bike path in suburban Atlanta; a camera followed a man walking through a Macy’s parking lot in Bakersfield; surveil children swinging on a swingset at a playground; and film high-res video of people sitting at a stoplight in traffic. In one case, we were able to watch a man rollerblade down Brookhaven, Georgia’s Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. The Flock camera zoomed in on him and tracked him as he rolled past. Minutes later, he showed up on another exposed camera livestream further down the bike path. The camera’s resolution was good enough that we were able to see that, when he stopped beneath one of the cameras, he was watching rollerblading videos on his phone.

The exposure was initially discovered by YouTuber and technologist Benn Jordan and was shared with security researcher Jon “GainSec” Gaines, who recently found numerous vulnerabilities in several other models of Flock’s automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras. They shared the details of what they found with me, and I verified many of the details seen in the exposed portals by driving to Bakersfield to walk in front of two cameras there while I watched myself on the livestream. I also pulled Flock’s contracts with cities for Condor cameras, pulled details from company presentations about the technology, and geolocated a handful of the cameras to cities and towns across the United States. Jordan also filmed himself in front of several of the cameras on the Peachtree Creek Greenway bike path. Jordan said he and Gaines discovered many of the exposed cameras with Shodan, an internet of things search engine that researchers regularly use to identify improperly secured devices.

After finding links to the feed, “immediately, we were just without any username, without any password, we were just seeing everything from playgrounds to parking lots with people, Christmas shopping and unloading their stuff into cars,” Jordan told me in an interview. “I think it was like the first time that I actually got like immediately scared … I think the one that affected me most was as playground. You could see unattended kids, and that’s something I want people to know about so they can understand how dangerous this is.” In a YouTube video about his research, Jordan said he was able to use footage pulled from the exposed feed to identify specific people using open source investigation tools in order to show how trivially an exposure like this could be abused.

Last year, Flock introduced AI features to Condor cameras that automatically zoom in on people as they walk by. In Flock’s announcement of this feature, it explained that this technology “zooms in on a suspect exiting one car, stealing an item from another, and returning to his vehicle. Every detail is captured, providing invaluable evidence for investigators.” On several of the exposed feeds, we saw Flock cameras repeatedly zooming in on and tracking random people as they walked by. The cameras can be controlled by AI or manually.
The exposure highlights the fact that Flock is not just surveilling cars—it is surveilling people, and in some cases it is doing so in an insecure way, and highlight the types of places that its Condor cameras are being deployed. Condor cameras are part of Flock’s ever-expanding quest to “prevent crime,” and are sometimes integrated with its license plate cameras, its gunshot detection microphones, and its automated camera drones. Cooper Quintin, senior staff technologist at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told me the behavior he saw in videos we shared with him “shows that Flock's ambitions go far beyond license-plate surveillance. They want to be a nation-wide panopticon, watching everyone all the time. Flock's goal isn't to catch stolen cars, their goal is to have total surveillance of everyone all the time."

The cameras were left not just livestreaming to the internet for anyone who could find the link, but in many cases their administrative portals were left open with no login credentials required whatsoever. On this portal, some camera settings could be changed, diagnostics could be run, and text logs of what the camera was doing were being streamed, too. Thirty days of the camera’s archive was left available for anyone to watch or download from any of the cameras that we found. We were not able to geolocate every camera that was left unprotected, but we found cameras at a New York City Department of Transportation parking lot, on a street corner in suburban New Orleans, in random cul-de-sacs, in a Lowes parking lot, in the parking lot of a skatepark, at a pool, outside a parking garage, at an apartment complex, outside a church, on a bike path, and at various street intersections around the country. 404 Media did not change any settings on any cameras and only viewed footage.

“This is not the first time we have seen ALPRs exposed on the public internet, and it won't be the last. Law enforcement agencies around the country have been all too eager to adopt mass surveillance technologies, but sometimes they have put little effort into ensuring the systems are secure and the sensitive data they collect on everyday people is protected,” Quintin said. “Law enforcement should not collect information they can’t protect. Surveillance technology without adequate security measures puts everyone’s safety at risk.” It was not always clear which business or agency owned specific cameras that were left exposed, or what type of misconfiguration led to the exposure, though I was able to find a $348,000 Flock contract for Brookhaven, Georgia, which manages the Peachtree Creek Greenway, and includes 64 Condor cameras. "This was a limited misconfiguration on a very small number of devices, and it has since been remedied," a Flock spokesperson told 404 Media. It did not answer questions about what caused the misconfiguration or how many devices ultimately were affected. 💡 Do you know anything else about surveillance? I would love to hear from you. Using a non-work device, you can message me securely on Signal at jason.404. Otherwise, send me an email at jason@404media.co. In response to Jordan and Gaines’ earlier research on vulnerabilities in other Flock cameras, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said in a LinkedIn post that “The Flock system has not been hacked. We secure customer data to the highest standard of industry requirements, including strict industry standard encryption. Flock’s cloud storage has never been compromised.” The exposure of these video feeds is not a hack of Flock’s system, but demonstrates a major misconfiguration of at least some cameras. It also highlights a major misconfiguration in its security that persisted for at least days. “When I was making my last video [about Flock ALPR vulnerabilities], it was almost like a catchphrase where I'd say like, ‘I don't see how it could get any worse.’ And then something would happen where you'd be like, wow, they pulled it off. They made it worse,” Jordan said. “And then this is like the ultimate one. Because this is completely unrelated [to my earlier research] and I don’t really know how it could be any worse to be honest.”

In a 2023 video webinar introducing the Condor platform to police, Flock executives said the cameras are meant to be paired with their ALPR cameras and are designed to feed video to FlockOS, a police panel that allows cops to hop from camera to camera in real time across a mapped-out view of their city. In Bakersfield, which has 382 Flock cameras according to a transparency report, one of the Condor cameras we saw was located next to a mall that had at least two Flock ALPR cameras stationed at the entrances to the mall parking lot. Kevin Cox, a Flock consultant who used to work for the Grand Prairie, Texas Police Department, said in the webinar that he built an “intel center” with a high “density” of Flock cameras in that city. “I am passionate about this because I’ve lived it. The background behind video [Condor] with LPR is rich with arrests,” he said. “That rich experience of seeing what happened kind of brings it alive to [judges]. So video combined with the LPR evidence of placing a vehicle at the scene or nearby is an incredibly game changing experience into the prosecutorial chain of events.” “You can look down a tremendous distance with our cameras, to the next intersection and the next intersection,” he said. “The camera will identify people, what they’re wearing, and cars up to a half a mile away. It’s that good.”

In the webinar Cox pulled up a multiview panel of a series of cameras and took control of them, dragging, panning, and zooming on cameras and hopping between multiple cameras in real time. Cox suggested that police officers could either use Flock’s cameras to pinpoint a person at a place and time and then use it to request “cell tower dumps” from wireless companies, or could use cell GPS data to then go into the Flock system to track a person as they moved throughout a city. “If you can place that person’s cell phone and then the Condor video and Falcon LPR evidence, it would be next to impossible to beat that in court,” he said, adding that some towns may just want to have always-on, always recording video of certain intersections or town squares. “There’s endless endless uses to what we can do with these things.” On the webinar, Seth Cimino, who was a police officer at the Citrus Heights, California police department at the time but now works directly for Flock, told participants that officers in his city enjoyed using the cameras to zoom in on crimes. “There is an eagerness amongst our staff that are logged in that have their own Flock accounts to be able to monitor our ALPR and pan tilt zoom Condor cameras throughout the community, to a point where sometimes our officers are beating dispatch with the information,” he said. “If there’s an incident that occurs at a specific intersection or a short distance away where our Condor cameras can zoom in on that area, it allows for real time overwatch […] as I sit here right now with you—how cool is this? We just had a Flock alert here in the city. I mean, it just popped up on my screen!”

Staunton announced this afternoon that it will end its contract with Flock Safety and remove the six automated license plate readers installed throughout the city.

While a growing number of local residents have been vocal at City Council meetings about their opposition to the cameras, it was an email from the Flock Safety CEO that appears to have been the final straw in the city’s decision about the future of the ALPR technology.

The unsolicited email, sent on Monday, Dec. 8, to Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams, said that Flock, and the law enforcement agencies they partner with, “are under coordinated attack.”

The email from CEO Garrett Langley was likely intended to give police departments ammunition to fight back against some of the persistent arguments of opponents of the APLR technology related to hackability, sharing data, security and more.

However, Staunton didn’t like the picture Langley painted of those who oppose the technology.

“The attacks aren’t new,” Langley wrote. “You’ve been dealing with this for forever, and we’ve been dealing with this since our founding, from the same activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness. Now, they’re producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines. They’re also trying to turn a public records process into a weapon against you and against us.”

On Dec. 12, Williams replied to Langley, disagreeing with his assessment.

“As far as your assertion that we are currently under attack,” Williams wrote, “I do not believe that this is so. I have dedicated the last 41 years of my life to serving the citizens of the City of Staunton as a police officer, the last 22 as the police chief. What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes.

“These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders. ln short, it is democracy in action.”

In a statement sent to media and residents this afternoon, the city said that Williams, in consultation with the City Manager and City Council, will move forward to cancel the city’s contract with Flock Safety.

“The City of Staunton wants to make it clear that the Flock Safety CEO’s narrative does not reflect the city’s values,” the statement read.

“The Staunton Police Department reported numerous successes utilizing this technology. Unfortunately, the city does not agree with the assessment as detailed by the CEO of Flock Safety. The Staunton Police Department remains fully committed to public safety through community-based policing, investigative techniques that utilize best practices, and other technology solutions.”

The city said it has already begun discussions with Flock to shut down the service.

“The City of Staunton is currently coordinating with Flock Safety to finalize the contract termination, turn off the license plate readers, and have them removed. In the near future, the city will provide an update with a more specific timeline.”

Staunton resident Aaron Barmer credited organizing for playing a big role in the city’s decision.

“I am very grateful to the many neighbors who’ve led and lit viable paths toward accomplishing today’s victory for all people who live in and visit our notable little city; and I’m grateful to the many neighbors who answered the call to bring heat and admonition to City Council and our city appointees until there was no mistaking the will of the people,” he said.

Another vocal opponent to the Flock technology, Mark Hopp, told AFP that he is thankful that Williams decided to pull the plug on the technology. He would like the city to enact measures to ensure that “rigorous public debate” is offered before surveillance technology is considered in the future.

“I believe this is a huge step in the right direction,” Hopp said. “However, I believe that I speak for the majority of those who have been pushing for this when I say this but we would like an ordinance requiring City Council approval before any surveillance-type technologies are put in place in the City of Staunton.”

The City of Charlottesville also announced this week that its 10 cameras would be removed. The 10 cameras were installed as part of a one-year pilot program that expired in October. In June, Charlottesville disconnected from the national shared network due to concerns about data being potentially used for Immigrations and Custom Enforcement.

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. —

The city of Cambridge, Massachusetts, severed ties with Flock Safety over two of their automatic license plate readers (ALPRs) installed in late November that officials weren't aware of.

Flock is a safety technology company that provides smart cameras, ALPRs, and other services for law enforcement agencies.

In late October 2025, the city council voted to end its agreement with Flock Safety for the license plate readers. As part of that, 16 of Flock's ALPRs that were deployed in the community were deactivated and removed by the city.

According to a city spokesperson, in late November, two cameras were installed by Flock technicians without the city's awareness.

"Due to this material breach of our trust and the agreement, the City terminated its contract with Flock Safety," the spokesperson said.

The city said the two cameras have since been removed.

"The Police Department, Law Department, IT Department, and City Manager’s Office had many meetings, internally and with Flock Safety, to discuss City Council and community concerns raised with the previously approved deployment of Flock’s automatic license plate readers (ALPRs), as well as data privacy and security, and the importance of ensuring Cambridge remains a welcoming and safe city for all of our residents," a Cambridge spokesperson said. "Moving ahead, the City plans to conduct a thorough evaluation of ALPRs in Cambridge and looks forward to re-engaging with the City Council and broader community about this technology."

NewsCenter 5 has reached out to Flock Safety for comment about the Cambridge incident.

Nearly 100 law enforcement agencies across Massachusetts utilize Flock Safety technology, according to a company spokesperson.

The company said each Flock customer "fully owns and controls 100% of its date," and that customers can decide if, when, and with whom to share the information.

"Data is automatically deleted by default after 30 days unless otherwise required by local law or policy," a company spokesperson said.

ARLINGTON, Va.—On Monday, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Ma.) sent a letter to U.S. Customs and Border and Protection Commissioner Rodney S. Scott, urging the agency to “immediately cease using a system of license plate readers (LPRs) and predictive algorithms to monitor the movements of individual Americans.” Markey’s letter comes after an investigation by the Associated Press exposed that the agency is using LPRs to surveil millions of innocent Americans and detain those with “suspicious” travel patterns. In that investigation, the AP largely focused on the story of Institute for Justice (IJ) client Alek Schott, who was unconstitutionally stopped, detained, and interrogated due to the program.

“We applaud Senator Markey for sounding the alarm on this massive, unconstitutional surveillance system. The warrantless use of LPR cameras—not only by the federal government, but by all law enforcement—must come to an end,” said IJ Senior Attorney Joshua Windham. “Driving isn’t a crime and innocent people shouldn’t be treated like criminal suspects simply because a government algorithm thinks their driving patterns are odd.”

In his letter, Senator Markey says, “the notion that an American could be stopped and detained based solely on an algorithmic determination about their driving behavior is deeply chilling.”

Through its Plate Privacy Project, IJ is fighting back against the warrantless use of LPR cameras. Last year, IJ sued the city of Norfolk, Virginia, alleging that its use of 176 license plate readers to track drivers’ movements is a Fourth Amendment violation. IJ also successfully persuaded a city in Arkansas to move an LPR that was directly in front of an innocent family’s home. Before the camera was moved, it captured photos of the family’s driveway and part of their front yard every time a vehicle drove by, and photographed the family every time they left or returned home. And IJ worked closely with activists in Scarsdale, New York, who wanted to end their village’s LPR program. The village ultimately scrapped its contract to install the cameras.

The rapid growth of automated license plate readers in Iowa is sparking calls for broader state regulations of the technology, with civil liberties advocates pointing to a new report claiming the technology infringes on privacy rights.

The ACLU of Iowa and the University of Iowa College of Law's Technology Law Clinic released a report Wednesday, Dec. 10, sounding the alarm on law enforcement agencies' growing use of ALPRs, the traffic cameras used along Iowa roadways that capture the license plates of passing vehicles.

The report looks at the use of this technology by 48 law enforcement agencies across Iowa, offering a snapshot of how a broad cross-section of Iowa communities deploy the devices and use the data they capture.

UI associate clinical professor Megan Graham, the director of the Technology Law Clinic who supervised the project, said the wide use of license-plate cameras in Iowa creates a “substantial network” of surveillance across the state.

The report highlights inconsistencies in the use and regulation of license-plate camera data in Iowa, including how it is kept and deleted, what information is publicly available and who can access the data and run searches.

“Because of the policy differences, the policy shifts and change(s) as Iowans drive from place to place around the state,” Graham said.

Information can be fed into a network of nationally shared databases that the ACLU says has few privacy protections and is subject to abuse.

ACLU of Iowa policy director Pete McRoberts recommended Iowa communities immediately pause their contracts with license-plate camera vendors since Iowa lacks a comprehensive law that constrains their use and regulates the data collected on people.

ACLU of Iowa legal director Rita Bettis Austen said Iowans may need broader protections as license-plate cameras may impinge on several federal rights, including the right to be free from unreasonable searches and seizures by the government.

There is no Iowa law limiting law enforcement to legitimate uses in deploying the cameras or requiring that Iowans are told when the devices are installed and active in a given location.

"They want to watch us," Bettis Austen said. "They want to be able to do so in secrecy, and this is fundamentally at odds with our democracy." What are Automated License Plate Readers?

The high-speed cameras used to capture license plates and color, make and model of every vehicle that come into view typically are freestanding but also can be mounted on objects such as road signs or police vehicles.

These are not to the same as automated traffic enforcement cameras that are triggered by a violation, such as speeding. License-plate cameras take images of all vehicles that pass, regardless of whether a motorist has done anything wrong.

The information license-plate cameras capture — including the plate and date, time and location — is gathered into a database accessible to government agencies. Law enforcement may access that information to check if vehicles are stolen, connected to any missing-person alerts or tied to someone who has a warrant for their arrest. Technology is growing in Iowa

ACLU officials contend local governments across Iowa are signing away Iowans' right to privacy as these devices are increasingly used for purposes beyond stopping crimes without more comprehensive regulations.

More than 35 Iowa communities use ALPRs, including Des Moines metro suburbs, Cedar Rapids, Waterloo and Dubuque. Central Iowa communities that deploy the cameras include Altoona, Ankeny, Carlisle, Indianola, Johnston, Norwalk, Pleasant Hill, Polk City, Urbandale, Waukee and West Des Moines.

Most have contracted with an Atlanta-based company called Flock Safety to use ALPR cameras. Twenty-seven of the 43 agencies that responded to the survey had contracts with Flock for agreements spanning one to five years.

Cedar Rapids operates the most cameras — 76 total — and has the highest single contract total of $499,250 for a two-year contract ending in July 2026. The report found the average contract is for about $4,404 per month.

Average costs vary for the other two vendors less commonly used by the surveyed Iowa communities, Axon and Motorola Solutions.

The study also identified 62 Iowa communities that have accessed other Iowa cities’ or counties’ ALPR databases, whether they have their own ALPRs or not.

Some cities, like Iowa City, only use ALPRs for traffic and parking enforcement. And some agencies limit which staff within their law enforcement agency may access data collected by the cameras.

Representatives for Flock did not immediately provide a comment in reaction to the report.

But in responding to similar report in Washington state, Flock issued a statement in October saying it is "is committed to helping communities improve public safety while remaining in compliance with their local laws, agency technology policies, and according to their community’s values." Report flags concerns with broad surveillance powers, ALPR errors

Flock’s national network is at the center of concerns over federal surveillance powers. The database allows local law enforcement or federal agencies to access other states' data for up to 30 days to solve cases faster, the company says.

There have been reported examples of the technology being used by local authorities to assist in immigration enforcement efforts as President Donald Trump's administration's illegal immigration crackdown intensifies. The study didn't find similar incidents in Iowa.

It also highlighted issues nationwide in which law enforcement officials held drivers at gunpoint, treating the encounter as a felony stop after license-plate cameras erroneously identified vehicles as stolen.

The report found some Iowa communities' contracts contained broad language that allows Flock to share the data "worldwide" and has a loosely defined "purpose."

The ACLU's McRoberts said that while a municipality's policy may be protective internally by limiting which personnel can access data, license-plate camera vendor agreements are "largely one-sided contracts." He said municipalities "have no power over their data once it leaves a jurisdiction."

Ultimately, McRoberts said local governments should outline their terms when solicited by vendors and propose to the company that data will not be shared outside the jurisdiction or the state without a warrant.

"The cities, one after the other, they fell like dominoes to these companies and they uniformly refused to assert their own power or to show the company that it takes two to tango," McRoberts said.

Five of the 48 selected agencies did not respond to the substance of ACLU's records request before the report was published, including the Des Moines Police Department, as well as police departments in Clinton, Fayette, Fremont and Mills. Graham said DMPD has identified responsive records but had not shared them yet.

Flock has previously said that customers have "complete control over their sharing relationships," and the company doesn't share their data without their permission. The company says agencies that contract with Flock may choose to collaborate with federal agencies but are never enrolled in automatic data sharing. ACLU of Iowa recommends cities pause license-plate camera use until the state regulates them

Iowa is not among the 22 states that have passed statutes to shield residents from license-plate camera use, though ACLU officials hoped that could change after the report's release.

"Iowans have less rights than some of our neighbors in the Midwest when it comes to ALPRs," the report states.

The report outlines the varied ways in which other Midwestern states, including Illinois, Kansas, Minnesota and Nebraska, have structured their laws regulating ALPRs.

Illinois' law is one of the more restrictive, barring the sharing of data for investigations related to lawful reproductive health care or a person’s immigration status. It also prohibits sharing data with out-of-state agencies without a written assurance of compliance with the Illinois law and requires that all ALPR information stay confidential.

Kansas’ statute is looser, pertaining more to the state’s public records law. It directs records requesters to send requests for ALPR information to the agency with the ALPR system, and it says that agencies do not have to share records that contain “captured license plate data” or would reveal the locations of ALPR cameras.

"Our view is that all of these contracts really do need to be put on hold while the Legislature concludes what they'll do for either what we hope is a comprehensive fix on privacy so that if these things are used, they are used for appropriate reasons that protect people's privacy," McRoberts said.

Flock has said it is "unaware of any credible case of Flock technology being used to prosecute a woman for reproductive health care or anyone for gender affirming health care."

It said it has introduced keyword filters to block those searches in areas where those uses are prohibited for license-plate cameras.

Against the advice of his own working group, Mayor Ben Walsh granted Flock the right to keep Syracuse drivers’ anonymized data.

Mayor Ben Walsh in 2023 granted Flock Safety the perpetual right to use Syracuse’s data — which Flock says it “anonymizes” by removing details from the data — when he signed an agreement with the company to provide the city with license plate readers.

The Flock Safety contract Walsh agreed to allows the company to access and disclose Syracuse drivers’ anonymized data for its own purposes.

Walsh’s decision flew in the face of recommendations of a hand-picked team of technology experts.

The Surveillance Technology Working Group, created by Walsh and composed of high-ranking city officials and knowledgeable stakeholders, in 2023 reviewed a proposed license plate reader program and issued Walsh a list of recommendations to guard against misuse.

Writing on behalf of the group, the city’s Chief Innovation and Data Officer Nico Diaz explicitly stated in a letter to Walsh that Syracuse must not grant Flock access to use the city’s data for its own purposes.

“Data should not be shared with the vendor and it must not be used to improve or contribute to the vendor’s existing products or to the development of new products,” Diaz wrote in 2023.

Central Current in October obtained the city’s contract with Flock as city lawmakers began pushing to sever Syracuse’s ties with the embattled surveillance technology manufacturer.

The Flock contract Walsh signed in Oct. 2023 grants the company a “non-exclusive, worldwide, perpetual, royalty-free right to use and distribute such Anonymized Data to improve and enhance the Services and for other development, diagnostic and corrective purposes, and other Flock offerings.” This includes the “training of machine algorithms,” according to the contract.

City officials contend they followed the working group’s recommendation because the data collected by license plate readers is anonymized by Flock, said the city’s Chief Policy Officer Greg Loh. At least one technology expert who sits on the working group believes it would be difficult for Flock to anonymize data to the degree the company says it can. Flock rejects that claim, and Loh supported the thoroughness of Flock’s anonymization process.

“Anonymized is clearly defined in the contract as being ‘permanently stripped of identifying details and any potential personally identifiable information, by commercially available standards which irreversibly alters data in such a way that a data subject (i.e., individual person or entity) can no longer be identified directly or indirectly,’” Loh wrote.

In a statement to Central Current, Syracuse Police Department spokesperson Kieran Coffey reiterated that the city is considering alternate license plate reader vendors. Coffey said the terms of the contract “speak for themselves.”

But Councilor Corey Williams, who worked with Councilor Jimmy Monto to initiate conversations about the city terminating its Flock contract, believes the contract clause in question is opaque, and factored into his and Monto’s decision to seek alternatives to Flock.

“There’s a number of reasons to find our contract with Flock problematic. This language is one of those reasons,” Williams said. “What we’re talking about is legal interpretations of a vague clause. We have no way of knowing that the Flock interpretation is the same as the city’s interpretation.”

Flock, a controversial surveillance company pledging to eliminate all crime in the country, provides Syracuse’s 13 license plate readers, which scan passing vehicles’ identifiable features and store that data in a cloud-based Flock server. The city purchased 26 Flock readers but has not installed the remaining 13.

Monto and Williams have led councilors in pushing back against Flock’s presence in Syracuse.

Earlier in 2025, the Syracuse Police Department found it had inadvertently opted into sharing data with Flock’s national network — a mistake that resulted in outside entities searching SPD’s data nearly 4.4 million times. Central Current in September reported that Flock had quietly granted Customs and Border Protection agents access to its servers, which at the time included Syracuse’s database. That secret agreement contradicted Flock’s repeated pledges that it had no formal agreements with federal immigration agencies, and undermined the company’s oft-touted insistence that its customers are the sole owners of the data their license plate readers collect. What is anonymized data?

In an interview with Central Current, Flock Safety’s chief legal officer Dan Haley and communications director Holly Beilin downplayed concerns about the potential misuse of data. An anonymized data clause is “ubiquitous” in agreements with technology companies whose offerings use data, Haley said.

Haley said other major tech companies anonymize data from customers and pointed to Tesla and Google as companies whose user data helps improve their products.

The Flock representatives characterized the company’s use of anonymized customer data as similarly targeted at small updates to maintain and improve the efficacy of Flock’s products.

As an example, Haley said that if one of the 49 states in which Flock operates were to change its license plate’s colors or images, a small team of Flock engineers would access anonymized data to update Flock’s systems and prevent the plate change from leading to mistaken recognition of letters and digits.

Beilin said that when Flock anonymizes its customers’ data, it anonymizes:

Process images
Plate number
Timestamp
Timeframe
GPS coordinates
User-entered text
Uploaded files
Feedback that appended the search

Flock maintains this anonymization process thoroughly safeguards against misuse of the customer-generated data — but Syracuse University professor Johannes Himmelreich disagrees.

An expert in autonomous systems and the ethics of artificial intelligence, Himmelreich critiqued the concept that the data Flock “anonymizes” is truly untraceable. Himmelreich said that image data, even stripped of all metadata, remains traceable, especially when an image is outdoors or the location of the image is known.

Himmelreich is a member of Syracuse’s Surveillance Technology Working Group. He voted for Syracuse to add license plate readers with stipulations like the one violated by Syracuse’s contract with Flock.

Referencing the popular digital “geo-guessing” games — through which individuals have learned how to identify the location of an image based on available details like street signs, roads, vehicle designs and more — Himmelreich argued that the same may be possible for the data Flock is taking from Syracuse, regardless of the company’s stripping images of their metadata.

“The images that these cameras capture have a lot of information. Even when you anonymize them by throwing away metadata, you can figure out where the image was taken,” Himmelreich said. “After all, you still see the street and everything around the car. So, I doubt that the anonymization is robust. There is a real risk to de-anonymize them.” ‘You’re talking about ‘Minority Report”’

Central Current asked Flock if the company uses customer-generated anonymized data to train predictive models or proactive algorithms or plans to in the future. The American Civil Liberties Union in July contended the company was already using AI to alert law enforcement to drivers an algorithm deems suspicious. Flock’s Syracuse contract states the company has the right to use its customers’ anonymized data for the “training of machine algorithms.”

“Gosh, you’re talking about Minority Report, huh?” Haley said, referencing the dystopian story of a world governed by a “Precrime System” that identifies future criminals before those individuals ever commit a crime.

The company’s website features language arguing its products can help “stop crime before it happens,” and elsewhere, touts the utility of AI to “predict” risk and potential threats.

“Flock very categorically, doesn’t build predictive policing technologies,” said Beilin, Flock’s communications director, calling the claims on Flock’s website “marketing language.”

Acknowledging that he “sort of” understood such sci-fi-inspired concerns, Haley said the utility of anonymized data is low. Haley maintained that Flock’s anonymization process prevents the data from being funneled back to law enforcement or being used to find an individual vehicle.

If the city does decide to contract with a separate vendor for license plate readers, Flock Safety retains the right to use Syracuse’s “anonymized data” even after termination of the city’s agreement with Flock, according to the city’s contract terms.

Himmelreich contended that Flock’s interest in obtaining data generated by its customers still presents concerns, regardless of the company’s intended uses of that data. He argued that Flock seems intent on gaining and keeping customer data, and intimated the company fails to honor its commitments to customers who choose against sharing their data with the company and other outside entities.

“When someone withdraws their consent, you got to respect that,” Himmelreich said. “Looking at that language about perpetuity, it’s not clear Flock is ready to do that.”

After Central Current’s interview with Beilin and Haley, the Associated Press released an investigative report revealing that U.S. Border Patrol is already using the sort of AI-algorithm-based predictive models that the Flock representatives compared to science fiction.

According to the AP’s reporting, Border Patrol agents are surveilling American drivers, and detaining those that a computer deems “suspicious,” regardless of whether a human law enforcement agent has determined if a traffic stop is warranted.

Many civil rights advocates and constitutional scholars argue that such massive, dragnet monitoring may violate individuals’ Fourth Amendment rights, but Border Patrol claims wide-sweeping authority to disregard aspects of Fourth Amendment rights within 100 miles of any border — a tract of land in which the majority of Americans live.

Himmelreich believes Flock has shown a pattern of accessing and sharing data it promised to protect and that Flock perceives its customers, like Syracuse, and their data as a component of the services the business is offering.

“It sometimes looks to me like Flock sees SPD not only as their customer but also as their product,” Himmelreich said.

Although the Eugene Police Department eventually shut it off, federal immigration enforcement officials initially had access to Eugene's Flock cameras, according to Flock's audits.

The University of Washington published a study in October that found in many cases police departments in Washington state were enrolled in Flock's "national lookup" feature, granting police departments nationwide access to the local departments' Flock data.

Phil Neff, a researcher who worked on that study, helped The Register-Guard interpret Flock's "network audit" that looked at searches of Eugene's Flock system, and found this was also the case here.

When Eugene first rolled out its cameras, it was enrolled in national lookup. Records show Eugene was included in 19 nationwide searches from US Border Patrol or Homeland Security in May and 197 Border Patrol searches in June.

During this time, out-of-state police departments also appeared to conduct nationwide searches on behalf of immigration enforcement that included Eugene, with many national Flock searches listing terms like "ICE" or "Immigration" as the reason for the search. The last of those came June 26 with two nationwide searches from the Jacksonville, Florida, sheriff's office for "immigration."

The audit also showed Eugene was included in the May 9 nationwide Flock search from the Johnson County, Texas, sheriff's office for a woman who "had an abortion."

Eugene eventually opted out of nationwide lookup on July 1, which is when the last searches from outside Oregon came. Skinner said when EPD rolled out Flock cameras, being enrolled in national lookup was the default.

"In those early stages of putting those cameras in, there was a short period of time where we are still really trying to hone in on what we felt like was going to be the good rhythm of where we shared information," he said and once EPD was "made aware" national lookup was on, it was turned off.

Once Eugene did this there were no more blatant immigration searches, but there continued to be vague searches. In September, there were 111 searches with the reason "investigation" and there were 20 searches from Medford police with the reason "Hehehe."

Medford police conducted regular searches of the Flock system for Homeland Security between 2021 and 2024, according to reporting from 404 Media.

There's more to know: Lane sheriff's office joins Eugene in ending Flock contract

Following a discussion at Eugene's Nov. 13 police commission meeting, Eugene updated its ALPR policy to address some of these concerns, including adding language to the policy stating:

"All searches of the ALPR system shall be documented using a case number, CAD number or searchable investigative reason."
"Eugene Police Department will opt out of the ALPR National Lookup Tool."
EPD will only opt into ALPR data-sharing with other police departments in Lane County, and law enforcement in other counties must request access on a case-by-case basis.

Lane County Sheriff Carl Wilkerson said he plans to share data with jurisdictions in Oregon, Washington and California once the sheriff's office installs cameras, because those states also have immigration sanctuary laws. Wilkerson announced Dec. 10 the sheriff's office was ending its contract with Flock Safety for license plate reading cameras.

According to Neff, the way Flock's system is set up, even if one agency shares with a second agency which then shares with a third agency, the third agency isn't able to access the first agency's data directly.

The Lane County Sheriff's has joined Eugene and Springfield in choosing to end its contract with Flock Safety on Dec. 10.

After Eugene and Springfield installed Automated License Plate Reader cameras earlier this year, two smaller communities west of Eugene: Veneta and Junction City, began their own discussions about ALPR technology.

ALPR cameras take photographs of passing cars, bicyclists and pedestrians and use AI to interpret those photographs, allowing police departments to search for vehicles by license plate as well as vehicle type, color and features. Georgia-based Flock Safety is the national leader in such cameras.

In the sheriff's office announcement, the agency cited Eugene and Springfield dropping their Flock contracts, which would reduce the utility of sheriff's office cameras because the agency wouldn't have the ability to share data with the cities. The sheriff's office left open the possibility of pursuing ALPR cameras from another vendor in the future.

With the sheriff's office pulling back from Flock Safety, so does Veneta, while in Junction City the ALPR conversation continued at its most recent city council meeting.

At a Nov. 24 Veneta City Council meeting, staff from the Lane County Sheriff's Office presented a proposal to place Flock cameras at the intersection of Territorial Highway and Highway 126.

Veneta does not have its own police department, instead it contracts with the sheriff's office. The cameras in Veneta would have been part of the sheriff's office's proposed network of 22 cameras at high-traffic areas in Lane County.

Sheriff Carl Wilkerson told councilors Flock cameras would speed up investigations and help officers. Residents at the meeting raised privacy concerns.

Following a discussion, two city councilors said they opposed the cameras, one said he supported them, and the remaining councilor and the mayor said they wanted more information.

Cameras in Veneta won't happen until at least the 2026 legislative session, where the state will likely pass new regulation on ALPR cameras, because the sheriff's office said it would wait for those rules before deploying cameras with another ALPR vendor.

Junction City's Council has discussed possibly installing ALPR cameras in that city. Councilors heard presentations from a Flock Safety representative Sept. 9, and from Axon, another ALPR vendor on Oct. 28.

Junction City police already use Axon ALPR cameras in their cars, Police Chief Mark Waddell said. A new contract, if approved, would be for fixed cameras like the ones installed in Eugene and Springfield.

On Dec. 9, Waddell presented a draft ALPR policy, which would guide JCPD's use of the technology, to City Council. He described the policy as Junction City police "getting it all ready to go" if and when the city pursues fixed ALPR cameras which wouldn't be for "a few months," at least.