A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.
Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.
The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.
Flock is aware of the exposure enabled by its own product design and has tried to do damage control with its law enforcement customers by blaming “increased public records act/FOIA activity seeking by the public,” according to an email Flock sent to police obtained via public record request. Flock has threatened Cris van Pelt, the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked, by going after his web hosts and claiming that he has violated their intellectual property rights and is posting information that “poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.” In recent weeks Flock severely limited the amount of information available on its audit logs, which are designed to be a transparency tool, raising questions about how much information journalists, regulators, and government agencies will be able to get about police use of Flock cameras in the future.
“I set up HaveIBeenFlocked to show how pervasive and prevalent this monitoring is, and to show just how many searches are getting done. That information, by itself, is shocking,” van Pelt told 404 Media. “To me, as a private citizen, that’s shocking, and I think that’s kind of what Flock is trying to hide or bury.” van Pelt added that he is committed to keeping the website online.