Audits Find Flock Safety Shared Local License Plate Data With Federal Agencies Without City Approval

Across the country, quiet street cameras built by Flock Safety have been caught letting federal agencies search local drivers’ movements without the cities ever agreeing to it.

Story Snapshot

Local audits found Flock’s “national lookup” tools let federal agencies search city license plate data without permission.
Settings meant to keep data inside a state or city were silently changed or re‑enabled by the vendor, breaking local laws and policies.
Cities from California to Washington have canceled contracts, launched lawsuits, and ordered emergency audits of Flock’s billion‑dollar surveillance network.
The controversy shows how a private tech company quietly built a nationwide tracking grid with deeper reach than most voters or officials understood.

How Flock’s Cameras Turned Into a National Tracking Network

Flock Safety sells automated license plate reader cameras to police and homeowner groups, promising help finding stolen cars and wanted suspects. Every time a car drives past, the system logs the plate number, make, model, color, time, and location, then uploads that record to Flock’s cloud servers for about 30 days by default. Instead of staying local, those records feed into “national lookup” and “statewide lookup” tools that let outside agencies search cameras they do not own.

Flock’s public messaging says federal sharing is off by default and communities control access. But draft contracts and audits tell a different story. An American Civil Liberties Union analysis found template agreements that give Flock a “worldwide” license to use customer data and the right to disclose it to law enforcement nationwide and to federal agencies for “investigative purposes,” even when a city thinks it has locked data to local use. In practice, this has meant broad sharing that many city leaders did not expect or understand.

Documented Cases of Federal Access Without Local Consent

In Mountain View, California, a city audit in early 2026 revealed that a “statewide lookup” setting was active on 29 of 30 cameras for 17 months, even though the city had never approved that sharing. During just one year, more than 250 outside agencies ran an estimated 600,000 searches of Mountain View’s license plate data, including federal offices like the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Air Force. A separate “national lookup” option on one camera had also been toggled on without the city’s knowledge.

Along California’s Central Coast, Oxnard police set their Flock system to “California only” to obey state law that bans sharing license plate data with federal or out‑of‑state agencies. A routine audit later found that a “vendor‑based issue” had silently re‑enabled the nationwide query feature, giving federal agencies access despite those legal limits. Nearby Ventura County reported a similar problem: its sheriff’s office had turned off national lookup in 2023, yet an audit showed roughly 364,000 unauthorized queries by outside agencies between February and March 2025, with staff insisting no one locally had flipped the setting back on.

Border and Immigration Enforcement Through Back‑Door Sharing

In Washington state, the University of Washington Center for Human Rights obtained records from 31 agencies and found the U.S. Border Patrol had “back door” access to license plate data from at least ten departments between May and August 2025. Those departments had not explicitly authorized sharing with Border Patrol. Yet the federal agency could still query local cameras because national or statewide sharing tools were active on the network, effectively turning local police systems into quiet arms of border enforcement.

Across multiple states, public records and civil rights groups have linked Flock’s system to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and other Department of Homeland Security units through indirect means. A report from the Electronic Frontier Foundation described more than 4,000 national and statewide lookups by local and state police, done either at the request of federal officials or as informal favors, often tied to immigration enforcement. An American Civil Liberties Union guide warns that departments using Flock feed data into a national pool that can be tapped by federal agencies, even when a city believes it has opted out.

Cities Push Back: Cancellations, Lawsuits, and New Rules

As these incidents came to light, dozens of communities on both coasts began canceling contracts and demanding answers. A technology industry report noted that more than 50 cities have moved to cut ties with Flock or freeze expansion after learning federal agencies accessed local data despite official bans. In Massachusetts, the American Civil Liberties Union urged municipal leaders to rewrite contracts and end relationships where Flock’s default sharing model conflicts with state privacy protections.

Garrett Langley, CEO of Flock Safety, called privacy activists "activist terrorists" in a closed meeting with law enforcement. Then got caught. Then sent an internal email: "My statement was inappropriate and I sincerely apologize."

The apology is fine, as apologies go. What it…

— The Dissent SF (@TheDissentSF) July 21, 2026

In California, a class‑action lawsuit filed in 2026 claims Flock illegally tracked millions of residents’ daily movements and shared those records with out‑of‑state and federal agencies, violating state privacy laws and sanctuary policies that forbid helping immigration enforcement. Other audits, like one in Austin, Texas, warn that vague contract language may let Flock keep data longer than promised or reuse it for its own purposes. Policy groups now urge clear retention limits, public data‑sharing agreements, and strict bans on private companies redistributing government surveillance data.

Why This Matters for Everyday Americans

For many Americans, these stories confirm a deeper fear: powerful institutions are building huge tracking systems first and talking to the public later. Conservatives who worry about a growing surveillance state and liberals who fear unchecked corporate and federal power can both see a problem when a private company quietly wires thousands of cameras into a national grid that tracks people who are not suspected of any crime. Most of the scanned plates belong to ordinary drivers; studies show more than 99 percent of reads are unrelated to an investigation.

At the same time, local officials often sign boilerplate contracts under pressure to “do something” about crime, only to discover later that their residents’ data is flowing far beyond city lines. Whether a person fears federal immigration raids, politicized law enforcement, or simple abuse of power, the idea that a vendor can flip a switch and expose local data to distant agencies feeds a growing sense that the system serves elites and institutions first and ordinary citizens last. That concern now drives calls from across the political spectrum to pull the plug on Flock’s nationwide sharing tools or to ban them outright.