Mass Surveillance for Profit: Flock’s AI Reports “Suspicious” Movement to Police
by Sagi Schwartzberg
Flock, a private police surveillance company, has built an enormous nationwide database and license plate tracking system which collects records of Americans’ travel and makes this vast database available to law enforcement across the country. This system allows police to search the nationwide movement of any vehicle.
In a February 13, 2025, press release, Flock touted a new “Expansive AI and Data Analysis Toolkit for Law Enforcement,” which included a function called “Multi-State Insight.” With this feature, Flock claimed that “law enforcement is alerted when suspect vehicles have been detected in multiple states, helping investigators uncover networks and trends linked to major organized crime.”
According to a July 2025 analysis by the American Civil Liberties Union, Flock offered this capability through a larger “Investigations Manager” that urged law enforcement officers to “Maximize [their] LPR data to detect patterns of suspicious activity across cities and states.” The system includes the ability to “uncover vehicles frequently seen together” (known as “Convoy Search”) or vehicles seen in multiple locations. Flock’s Toolkit essentially allows law enforcement to use Flock’s network not only to investigate vehicles, and by extension people, based on suspicion of a crime; it can be used to generate suspicion in the first place. Flock’s system is actively evaluating vehicles to determine if they should be reported to law enforcement as potential participants in organized crime. But what does Flock’s system use to determine such suspicion?
Flock is a private company that has frequently operated outside the reach of standard checks and balances such as open records laws. Therefore, for much of 2025, there was no way to know the nature of the algorithm(s) it used, the logic upon which it was trained, or the nature and frequency of its error rates.
By late 2025, however, the consequences of this opacity became clear. In November 2025, the Electronic Frontier Foundation (“EFF”) revealed that law enforcement had used Flock’s network to surveil participants in the “No Kings” protests against government overreach. According to the EFF’s analysis of 10 months of nationwide searches on Flock’s servers, more than 50 federal, state, and local agencies ran hundreds of searches through Flock’s national network in connection with protest activity, with some agencies using search terms like “No King” and “Protest” to track vehicles associated with demonstrators, validating fears that the tools would be used for political monitoring.
Furthermore, despite Flock’s assurances that customers own their data, investigations throughout 2025 reportedly revealed that the company had facilitated unauthorized access for federal agencies. In August, the Illinois Secretary of State announced that an audit had discovered Flock gave U.S. Customs and Border Protection (“CBP”) access to Illinois license plate camera data, with Illinois cameras among approximately 80,000 cameras that the immigration agency had tapped into. Similar audits in Washington state confirmed that CBP had accessed local camera networks in violation of state laws and sanctuary city policies. In one egregious case in Evanston, Illinois, Flock was caught in September 2025 reinstalling cameras that the city had explicitly ordered to be removed, prompting the city to issue a cease-and-desist order.
In a democracy, the government must not be allowed to surveil its people “just in case” they do something wrong and should not be able to use a private company’s technology to accomplish the same thing with no oversight. Fortunately, communities have begun to fight back. Following these revelations, cities including Eugene, Oregon, and Longmont, Colorado, voted in December 2025 to end or scale back their contracts with Flock, citing privacy risks and a loss of trust. Other cities, including Syracuse, New York, began considering similar measures.
Sources: ACLU, EFF, Evanston RoundTable, 404 Media
As a digital subscriber to Criminal Legal News, you can access full text and downloads for this and other premium content.
Already a subscriber? Login
