S7, E277 - He Used a Police Camera Network to Track His Girlfriend 180 Times

Flock Safety's automated license plate readers are in over 5,000 communities and used by more than 40,000 cameras nationwide — sold to cities as a tool to catch car thieves and find missing people. But a Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers accused of misusing the system, most of them to track romantic partners.

This episode covers:

• The scale of Flock's network and how warrantless searches are legally justified
• Individual abuse cases in Wichita, Milwaukee, and New Bedford
• The Texas sheriff's office case tied to reproductive-related searches
• 404 Media's reporting on ICE's informal access to Flock data despite no official contract
• Flock's "Freeform" search feature and the race/ethnicity flagging controversy
• CEO Garrett Langley's August 13 apology and the new audit reforms
• The historical parallel: NSA's "LOVEINT" scandal from the Snowden leaks
• What's actually working: 39+ contracts canceled by cities in 2026
• 3 concrete steps if your town has these cameras

flock safety, flock cameras, license plate reader, ALPR, police surveillance, data privacy, police stalking, automated license plate reader, mass surveillance, privacy please podcast, cybersecurity, ICE surveillance, police misconduct, LOVEINT

Transcript

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A Stalking Case That Scales

SPEAKER_00 0:00

A cop used a nationwide camera network to track his girlfriend's car. Not once, 180 times in two months. And there's a decent chance that same system is running in your town right now. And today we're talking about a story that has been unfolding basically in real time. As in the CEO of the company at the center of it apologized on national television just a week or two ago. What in the actual Flock is going on? Here's the setup. There's a company called Flock Safety. They make automated license plate reader cameras, over 40,000 of them installed across the country, used by more than 5,000 law enforcement agencies, sold to towns and cities as a tool to catch car thieves, find missing people, and solve

How Flock’s ALPR Network Works

SPEAKER_00 1:15

crimes. Sounds pretty reasonable, right? Quick context before any of these stories, because you need to understand what this system can actually do. Flox cameras use AI to scan every car that passes, plates, makes, models, colors, even distinguishing features like a missing hubcap or a bumper sticker. It's not one camera watching one intersection. It's a connected, searchable, nationwide network. Kind of like cell phone towers, but for your car. An officer in one state can search camera data in another state entirely. No warrant required for most searches because courts have generally treated this like an officer just writing down what they see in public. Except it isn't. One officer watching one street corner can't instantly cross-reference every car that passed through an entire city, let alone the country in seconds. Flock can. That difference in scale is the whole story entirely.

The Pattern Of Officer Misuse

SPEAKER_00 2:16

Here's what wasn't in the pitch though. A Washington Post investigation found at least fifty law enforcement officers accused or charged with misusing this exact system. Over half of those cases involve officers tracking romantic partners. Not suspects, not criminals, their exes, current partners, people they were personally and very unhealthily interested in. This isn't a hypothetical slippery slope. It's literally already happening over and over in departments across the country. Today, we're digging into how and why the company's response only came after months of pressure and what that says about what happens every single time we hand a surveillance network to people and just trust them to not misuse it. Let's dig into it. In Wichita, Kansas, a police lieutenant used Flock to track his estranged wife's whereabouts, ran her plate, pulled her movements, he pleaded guilty to stalking and computer crime charges, and lost his officer certification entirely. That's one guy, one bad actor, caught, punished, done. If this were the whole story, it'd be a bad apple story. Tragic, but contained. The problem is it isn't the whole story. In Milwaukee, an officer resigned after allegedly using the network to track his romantic partner and one of the partner's exes, nearly 180 times over two-month period. Not once, not out of concern, 180 separate searches. Just this month in New Bedford, Massachusetts, an officer is under active internal affairs investigation right now, this week, after his ex-girlfriend filed for a protective order. Her affidavit says he ran her license plate through Flock to follow her. So now we're not talking about one lieutenant in Kansas, we're talking about a pattern. Wichita, Milwaukee, New Bedford, different states, different departments, same exact behavior. And that pattern is what turns this from a personal problem into a design problem. But even

Abortion Policing And Mission Creep

SPEAKER_00 4:24

that's not where this gets structurally worse. There's a case that got national attention. You might have heard of it. A Texas Sheriff's Office accused of using flock to track down a woman who had an abortion. That's illegal in that state. The department denies it. Says they were looking for a missing person, but it happened during a documented pattern of flock searches tied to reproductive related investigations, including a case out of Washington State where local flock data was searched as part of an effort that led to a woman potentially facing criminal charges over self-managed abortion. 50 officers, over half involving personal relationships, not police work. This isn't a few bad apples doing something creative with a tool. This is what the tool gets used for, predictably, once enough people have access to it. And here's where it gets a little

ICE Side Door Access And Freeform Searches

SPEAKER_00 5:17

worse. Because the individuals stocking the cases, as awful as they are, aren't even the biggest problem. Flock has publicly said repeatedly that it doesn't share data with ICE. Technically, that's true. There's no formal contract. But an investigation by 404 Media found that ICE gained what's basically side door access, anyways. Over 4,000 immigration-related searches were run through Flock's network by local police acting informally on ICE's behalf across more than 5,000 communities nationwide. In Illinois, where state law explicitly prohibits using this data for immigration enforcement, police still ran these searches. Discovered because officers literally typed words like ICE or immigration into the required reasoning field. There's also a Flock feature called Freeform, which lets users search camera footage by descriptors like clothing, tattoos, and race. Flock's response when 404 Media reported this was that they added guardrails flagging searches using terms related to race, ethnicity, religion, or nationality. Think about that for a second. The fact that they had to add a flag for someone searching by race means someone was already doing it. To be fair though, to Flock, starting late August, they did remove federal agencies from the National Search Network and in January added a toggle letting individual departments turn off all federal data sharing. So there's been real movement, but it took over a year of investigative reporting before that movement ever happened. Which brings us to today, to in the last few

CEO Apology And A Familiar History

SPEAKER_00 7:03

weeks. On August 13th, Flock CEO Garrett Langley went on CBS and apologized directly, specifically referencing one woman's story he'd listened to that morning. And this is his quote, it kills me that she went through that. End quote. Here's my honest read on this. An apology after a Washington Post investigation, after months of local reporting, after dozens of individual women have already been stalked using this system. That's not proactive accountability. That's reactive damage control. Arriving exactly when the story got too big to ignore. The reforms are real and will probably help, but they're happening because of public pressure, not because the company caught this on their own. I want to give you one piece of history because this pattern isn't actually new. It just has a new brand name attached to it this time. Back in 2013, during the Snowden leaks, remember Snowden? A term entered the public vocabulary, Love, short for love intelligence. NSA officials admitted some employees had used the agency's surveillance systems to spy on romantic partners. Sound familiar? Same exact behavior, different decade, different technology, same predictable outcome. That's the actual lesson here. And it's bigger than one company. Any system built for mass surveillance, no matter how good the intended use case sounds, eventually gets used by the people with access to it to surveil the people in their own lives. Every single time, that's not a flock problem, people. That's what happens whenever you build the capability and hand out access without real oversight. Just like social media, just like a lot of other dark corners of tech.

Contract Cancellations And What To Do

SPEAKER_00 9:06

Here's the part that's actually working. And it's worth knowing about. At least 39 flock contracts have been canceled by local governments so far in 2026. Cities like Fort Collins, Eugene, Madison, Knoxville, and Syracuse, people have shown up to protest. Some have even resorted to vandalizing cameras, and listen, I'm not endorsing that, but it tells you how strongly some communities feel about this. Advocacy groups like the ACLU and Fight for the Future are actively organizing to get more towns to cancel contracts and pushing commercial clients like Lowe's to drop the cameras entirely. Here's what you can actually do about it if it bothers you as much as it bothers me. Number one, find out if your town has flocked cameras. Most jurisdictions have to disclose this. There are public trackers and local news coverage you can search for your specific city. Number two, if you do have them, file a public records request for the audit logs. Departments have to log a reason for every search. You or local journalists can actually check whether that log is being followed and whether anyone's reviewing it. Number three, show up to your city council. A lot of these contracts get approved with basically zero public debate. Cancellations are happening because residents are showing up and asking the questions nobody asked the first time around. Just like always, in these deep, disturbing, but also very interesting stories, I always have something I keep coming back to. Every one of these systems gets sold to us with a best case scenario. Catch the car thief. Find the missing kid. Nobody pitches you on, and also some percentages of the people who access this are going to use it to stalk their exes. But that's what happens every single time with every surveillance system humans have ever built. Because the technology doesn't have judgment, the people using it do. And not all of them have it. If your town has these cameras, or you're not sure, that's worth five minutes of your time to actually check.

Closing Thanks And Website Plug

SPEAKER_00 11:17

Anyways, thanks for listening to Privacy Please. Stay safe out there. Thank you so much for tuning in, as always, and supporting the show. If you haven't checked out our website, theproblemlounge.com, check it out. Things are crazy right now, but we're gonna have more and more guests and more episodes coming out soon. Thanks for your patience. Um life is just a little crazy right now. Thank you so much for those who still are supporting the show and any of our new listeners. Thank you so much for tuning in. Hope you enjoyed it. And we'll see you on the next one. Cameron Ivey over and out.