Six Hundred Times
A woman found out her police officer ex-boyfriend had looked up her license plate — and her daughter’s — in Flock’s camera system six hundred times. Not once. Not twice. Six hundred separate queries, tracing where she went and when, until she found out through a website that aggregates police search logs obtained through public records (Have I Been Flocked). Read that again: the victim had to build the oversight herself.
The Washington Post, via Slashdot, analyzed police and court records and found at least 50 officers charged or accused of using license-plate readers for unauthorized purposes. In 26 of those cases, investigators said the officers used the tech to spy on wives, girlfriends, exes, exes’ new partners, or women they wanted to meet. Flock’s system was involved in 46 of the 50. In some instances, the tracking led to violent confrontations.
Now the CEO, Garrett Langley: “We’re not going to change humans, and humans make bad decisions. What we can do is make sure that they know if you use this tool, you will be held accountable.” Misuse, he says, is inevitable. The company’s fix: better filters “soon,” plus an optional “audit assistance” feature agencies can choose to enable — one that scans for suspicious patterns, like a single account repeatedly querying the same vehicle.
The counterarguments, because there are good ones.
“It’s a few bad apples.” Fifty charged officers is a floor, not a census. The only reason we know about any of this is that volunteers pried audit logs loose with FOIA requests and cross-referenced them against police rosters. A cop searching his ex’s plate six hundred times looks indistinguishable from a cop doing his job — until someone with a database and a grudge against injustice decides to look. You don’t find abuse you don’t audit, and Flock’s auditing is opt-in per agency. The dark figure is bigger than the count. It always is.
“They’re building accountability tools.” After the fact, voluntarily, and “soon.” Audit assistance catches the searcher — after the searching. It doesn’t un-see what the stalker learned, and it doesn’t undo the confrontation that the log made possible. The site counting the days since Flock promised transparent security-audit updates is at 181 and climbing. When a vendor’s roadmap is “we’ll announce filters soon,” read that as “we haven’t built the thing that should have existed before the first camera went up.”
“Plates are public. It’s just cameras reading what’s visible.” A single glance at a plate is public. A year of glances, stitched into the rhythms and travels of a person’s daily life, is not public — it’s a dossier. That’s the entire product. The stalking cases aren’t a bug in it; they’re a demonstration of what it does. Flock doesn’t sell cameras. It sells the pattern. The pattern is the harm.
Here’s what bugs me about “we’re not going to change humans.” Langley is describing his own product as a law of nature, like gravity. But the design choices were his: no warrant required, auditing that agencies have to opt into, no alert when one account queries the same plate six hundred times, data shared across agencies that never asked for it. When the answer to “your tool is a stalking network” is “people are flawed,” you’re selling the surveillance and billing the victims for the human condition.
The fix isn’t another corporate accountability feature. It’s sunlight: make every search public, by default — the way Have I Been Flocked does with the logs it drags out of police departments. Every query, every reason code, every badge number, out in the open. Watch the stalking evaporate. The people who built the network say they can’t stop the abuse; the people who audit the network just proved that transparency can.
Six hundred times. The cameras saw everything. They just never once looked back.
Sources: Slashdot / The Washington Post — Rogue police officers have turned Flock’s camera network into a stalking tool, Have I Been Flocked, Footnote4a