The One-Day Contract That Should Terrify Every Surveillance Company
Here’s a story that should make every surveillance vendor lose sleep.
In April, the city of Oshkosh, Wisconsin was considering a contract with Flock Safety — the company that sells automatic license plate readers to police departments across the country. During the city council meeting, a council member asked Flock’s chief information security officer a direct question: does your system create heat maps that reveal where a specific vehicle has traveled over time?
The CISO said no. Flatly, publicly, on the record.
The council approved the contract.
The very next morning, the city discovered Flock had lied.
Flock’s system absolutely does create heat maps — it shows where “point-in-time images have been captured of a vehicle” for up to an entire month. The city council reconvened, revoked the contract, and set what might be a world record: the shortest time between approving and canceling a Flock contract. Twenty-four hours.
Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson put it better than I could: “I don’t know how this body can govern if someone tells untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths.”
Here’s the part that matters: Oshkosh wasn’t an anomaly. The ACLU published a detailed report documenting a pattern.
In Colorado, Flock told a police chief that federal agencies had no access to his town’s ALPR data, and their CEO assured the press the company had no federal contracts. They were forced to admit later that they did — with CBP and DHS.
When reports surfaced that police were sharing Flock data with ICE, Flock published a blog titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No.” But the question wasn’t about direct access — it was about cops doing the sharing on their own. Flock knew this. They wrote the misleading headline anyway.
Last year, Flock’s system was used by Texas law enforcement to track someone seeking abortion care in Illinois. Flock’s response was a “Proactive Search Term Tool” that was trivially easy to bypass. The ACLU of Massachusetts found police searching Flock’s system for “investigation” 111 times in a single month, and “hehehe” on 20 occasions.
Flock even lied about partnering with the ACLU. They didn’t.
Now, the counterarguments.
Maybe this is just one bad company. Possible. But the surveillance industry’s incentive structure makes this behavior rational. You’re selling to city council members and police chiefs who mostly cannot technically verify your claims. The cost of lying is a canceled contract. The cost of honesty is losing deals to competitors who will say anything. That math rewards dishonesty until you get caught. And when you get caught, you call it “one small misconception” and move on. That’s exactly what Flock did.
But ALPRs solve real crimes. Yes, they can. But a company that lies about its core capabilities — that denies its system tracks vehicle movement when asked directly — forfeits the right to make that argument. If you can’t trust what they say about the product, you can’t trust what they say about the safeguards either.
The surveillance state isn’t going anywhere anyway. That’s what one HN commenter said, and they’re probably right. But “inevitable” and “unchecked” are different problems. Companies that get caught lying should face consequences that sting. Oshkosh did it right. Most cities don’t.
Flock’s response to Oshkosh wasn’t “we’re sorry, we’ll fix this.” It was an attack on the city council for not giving them “the opportunity to explain their lie.”
That’s not a PR problem. That’s a culture problem. And when your business is building the surveillance infrastructure your city will depend on for a decade, “culture problem” is a dealbreaker.
Oshkosh figured it out in one day. How many cities haven’t?
Sources: ACLU report by Chad Marlow and Jay Stanley, Hacker News discussion