Flock threatens website hosting license plate data accidentally leaked by cops
Flock Safety, which operates license plate reading cameras in hundreds of cities across the country, is allegedly attempting to shut down a website that allows individuals to see whether they were surveilled by the company’s technology. The website, known as HaveIBeenFlocked, obtained the data after multiple police departments failed to properly redact license plate information in audit logs that were released in response to public records requests.
As first reported by the tech news site 404 Media, the audit logs contained not only 2.3 million license plates but tens of millions of searches made by thousands of police departments with Flock contracts. The searches detail sensitive information such as surveillance targets, suspects and victims of crime.
Users can also perform searches based on the reasons cited by law enforcement for querying license plate data. Searching for the term “protest,” for example, lists 985 results with the times and dates that specific law enforcement agencies made the queries.
In a statement, HaveIBeenFlocked’s creator, Cris van Pelt, defended the site as a service that merely “aggregates and reformats already-public information.”
“This information represents a fraction of what’s being shared with Flock and its government, commercial, and private partners on a daily basis,” Pelt wrote. “Policies exist to prevent the release of this information — they are not adhered to. Laws and regulations exist to enforce the policies — they go unenforced. Police, Flock, and politicians have been ignoring these problems for years while your private movements continue to be collected, catalogued, sold and traded.”
In an email to 404 Media, Flock described Pelt’s service as a “website that is doxxing cops during active investigations.”
Flock’s aggressive response
HaveIBeenFlocked allows users to enter their license plate numbers to determine whether “an operator on the Flock system queried the database for your license plate using the Flock application/website.”
Flock initially responded to the data exposure by telling law enforcement, according to an email obtained through a public records request, that the issue was caused by “increased public records act/FOIA activity seeking by the public.”
But van Pelt says Flock has attempted to bring down his website by having a third-party company tell his web hosts that he’s violated Flock’s intellectual property rights. Pelt’s web hosts were also told that his service “poses an immediate threat to public safety and exposes law enforcement officers to danger.”
Pelt’s web hosts include Cloudflare, which thus far has declined the take-down requests, saying there is “insufficient evidence of a violation.”
As it tried to shut down van Pelt’s site, Flock has also significantly limited the amount of data it puts in its audit logs, ensuring that any future releases from public records requests will contain minimal data, according to 404 Media.
‘Coordinated attack’
Pelt’s website is not the first to be targeted by Flock, as privacy advocates and people concerned about surveillance complain about the ubiquity of the company’s cameras.
DeFlock, an open source project that is mapping the location of Flock cameras across the country, was hit with a cease-and-desist letter from Flock in February last year.
The company’s aggressive approach was also witnessed in December when Flock’s CEO, Garrett Langley, sent an unsolicited email to the police chief in Staunton, Virginia, as the city debated whether to cancel its contract with Flock after complaints from citizens.
In the email, Langley alleged that the nationwide pushback against Flock was proof that law enforcement was “under coordinated attack.” Langley went on to refer to concerned citizens as members of “activist groups who want to defund the police, weaken public safety, and normalize lawlessness.”
The email also accused technologist Benn Jordan, who published a video to YouTube after discovering more than 60 live Flock camera feeds exposed online, of “producing YouTube videos with misleading headlines.”
Staunton Police Chief Jim Williams and the city responded by refuting Langley’s characterization of its residents before cancelling their contract.
“What we are seeing here is a group of local citizens who are raising concerns that we could be potentially surveilling private citizens, residents and visitors and using the data for nefarious purposes,” Williams wrote to Langley. “These citizens have been exercising their rights to receive answers from me, my staff, and city officials, to include our elected leaders.”
“In short,” Williams wrote, “it is democracy in action.”
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Ella Rae Greene, Editor In Chief
