Flock Safety, a company that owns cameras that log the license plates and locations of vehicles, has recently stopped working with federal law enforcement due to worries about the purpose of certain investigations.
Recently, the company has ended cooperation with the Department of Homeland Security’s Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security Investigations divisions. Federal agents working there are no longer allowed to access the company’s 80,000 cameras across the United States.
Illinois’s Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias recently announced, after an audit he made, that Customs and Border Protection had accessed Illinois data from Flock, although the data was not said to be immigration specific. This goes against a state law Giannoulias pushed in 2023 that is supposed to prevent sharing license plate location data for out-of-state investigations related to illegal abortions or immigration.
In a statement, Giannoulias emphasized that this law was put in place deliberately to combat federal action in situations like this. “This law, passed two years ago, aimed to strengthen how data is shared and to prevent this exact thing from happening,” Giannoulias said. “This sharing of license plate data of motorists who drive on Illinois roads is a clear violation of state law.”
The data that Flock Safety collects is not owned by Flock itself, but by the local law enforcement where the cameras are located. Local police departments receive inquiries from agencies, not Flock.
According to Garrett Langley, the company’s CEO and founder, Flock had partnered with federal agencies to combat human trafficking and the spread of fentanyl. But, with push-back from Giannoulias and privacy advocates, the company has shut down their services for federal agencies after worries about data usage.
Langley has said that Flock isn’t aware of any immigration-related queries, but push-back on Flock’s sharing of data came after it was revealed that police from the Chicago area had shared information about a missing woman with a Texas sheriff. Her family was worried because she had gotten a self-administered abortion.
According to the sheriff, he was just worried about the woman’s safety and wanted her family to know where she was, but the centrality of abortion to the case made people worried. Flock received criticism for allowing such broad access to their data and has since modified their system to only allow federal agencies to do targeted, single case searches with a single local police department.
After this, Giannoulias requested for the search terms “abortion,” “immigration,” “ICE,” and others to be rejected if asked of Flock’s system. The company has since implemented these changes, though many concerns remain about Flock’s commitment to privacy and its possible violation of the 4th amendment.
