Cops Criticize Flock Safety After It’s Caught Handing Out Access To Federal Agencies

A California police department is none too happy that its license plate reader records were accessed by federal employees it never gave explicit permission to peruse. And, once again, it’s Flock Safety shrugging itself into another PR black eye.

Mountain View police criticized the company supplying its automated license plate reader system after an audit turned up “unauthorized” use by federal law enforcement agencies.

At least six offices of four agencies accessed data from the first camera in the city’s Flock Safety license-tracking system from August to November 2024 without the police department’s permission or knowledge, according to a press release Friday night.

Flock has been swimming in a cesspool of its own making for several months now, thanks to it being the public face of “How To Hunt Down Someone Who Wanted An Abortion.” That debacle was followed by even more negative press (and congressional rebuke) for its apparent unwillingness to place any limits at all on access to the hundreds of millions of license plate records its cameras have captured, including those owned by private individuals.

Mountain View is in California. And that’s only one problem with everything in this paragraph:

The city said its system was accessed by Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives offices in Kentucky and Tennessee, which investigate crimes related to guns, explosives, arson and the illegal trafficking of alcohol and tobacco; the inspector general’s office of the U.S.. General Services Administration, which manages federal buildings, procurement, and property; Air Force bases in Langley, Virginia, and in Ohio; and the Lake Mead National Recreation Area in Nevada.

Imagine trying to explain this to anyone. While it’s somewhat understandable that the ATF might be running nationwide searches on Flock’s platform, it’s almost impossible to explain why images captured by a single camera in Mountain View, California were accessed by the Inspector General for the GSA, much less Lake Mead Recreation Area staffers.

This explains how this happened. But it doesn’t do anything to explain why.

They accessed Mountain View’s system for one camera via a “nationwide” search setting that was turned on by Flock Safety, police said.

Apparently, this is neither opt-in or opt-out. It just is. The Mountain View police said they “worked closely” with Flock to block out-of-state access, as well as limit internal access to searches expressly approved by the department’s police chief.

Flock doesn’t seem to care what its customers want. Either it can’t do what this department asked or it simply chose not to because a system that can’t be accessed by government randos scattered around the nation is much tougher to sell than a locked-down portal that actually serves the needs of the people paying for it.

And that tracks with Ron Wyden’s criticism of the company in the letter he wrote to Flock last October:

The privacy protection that Flock promised to Oregonians — that Flock software will automatically examine the reason provided by law enforcement officers for terms indicating an abortion- or immigration-related search — is meaningless when law enforcement officials provide generic reasons like “investigation” or “crime.” Likewise, Flock’s filters are meaningless if no reason for a search is provided in the first place. While the search reasons collected by Flock, obtained by press and activists through open records requests, have occasionally revealed searches for immigration and abortion enforcement, these are likely just the tip of the iceberg. Presumably, most officers using Flock to hunt down immigrants and women who have received abortions are not going to type that in as the reason for their search. And, regardless, given that Flock has washed its hands of any obligation to audit its customers, Flock customers have no reason to trust a search reason provided by another agency.

I now believe that abuses of your product are not only likely but inevitable, and that Flock is unable and uninterested in preventing them.

Flock just keeps making Wyden’s points for him. The PD wanted limited access with actual oversight. Flock gave the PD a lending library of license plate/location images anyone with or without a library card (so to speak) could check out at will. Flock is part of the surveillance problem. And it’s clear it’s happy being a tool that can be readily and easily abused, no matter what its paying customers actually want from its technology.