this post was submitted on 13 Jan 2026
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Police Unmask Millions of Surveillance Targets Because of Flock Redaction Error (www.404media.co)
submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by tonytins@pawb.social to c/technology@lemmy.world
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The Flock saga continues.

A handful of police departments that use Flock have unwittingly leaked details of millions of surveillance targets and a large number of active police investigations around the country because they have failed to redact license plates information in public records releases. Flock responded to this revelation by threatening a site that exposed it and by limiting the information the public can get via public records requests.

Completely unredacted Flock audit logs have been released to the public by numerous police departments and in some cases include details on millions Flock license plate searches made by thousands of police departments from around the country. The data has been turned into a searchable tool on a website called HaveIBeenFlocked.com, which says it has data on more than 2.3 million license plates and tens of millions of Flock searches.

The situation highlights one of the problems with taking a commercial surveillance product and turning it into a searchable, connected database of people’s movements and of the police activity of thousands of departments nationwide. It also highlights the risks associated with relying on each and every law enforcement customer to properly and fully redact identifiable information any time someone requests public records; in this case, single mistakes by individual police departments have exposed potentially sensitive information about surveillance targets and police investigations by other departments around the country.

Archive: http://archive.today/yXLPQ

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[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 8 points 22 hours ago (1 children)

Enabling a surveillance state is not amoral.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 1 points 22 hours ago (2 children)

Your phrasing seems to imply I said it was, but I never said that.

[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 1 points 1 hour ago (1 children)

If you are in a discussion about the development and deployment of technology to facilitate a surveillance state, then saying “technology is neutral” is the least interesting thing you could possibly say on the subject.

In a completely abstract, disconnected-from-society-and-current-events sense it is correct to say technology is amoral. But we live in a world where surveillance technology is developed to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals. We live in a world where legal rights are being eroded by the use of this technology. We live in a world where this technology is profitable because it helps organizations violate individual rights. If you live in the US, as I do, then you live in a world where federal law enforcement agencies have become completely contemptuous of the law and are literally abducting innocent people off the street. They use the technology under discussion here to help them do that.

That a piece of tech might potentially be used for a not-immoral purpose is completely irrelevant to how it is actually being used in the real world.

[–] InternetCitizen2@lemmy.world 1 points 14 minutes ago (1 children)

to make it easier for corporations and the state to invade the privacy of individuals.

And that is what we need to focus our messaging on. The evil people and institutions enabling this as those are permanent. Tech comes and goes (and should not be anthropomized). Focusing on the tech just means in institution looks for another path. Focusing on the institution is to block the at the source.

[–] JollyG@lemmy.world 1 points 5 minutes ago

“Technology is neutral” is a bromide engineers use to avoid thinking about how their work impacts people. If you are an engineer working for flock or a similar company, you are harming people. You are doing harm through the technology you help to develop.

The massive surveillance systems that currently exist were built by engineers who advanced technology for that purpose. The scale and totality of the resulting surveillance states are simply not possible without the tech. The closest alternatives are stasi-like systems that are nowhere near as vast or continuous. In the actual world the actual tech is immoral. Because it was created for immoral purposes and because it is used for immoral purposes.

[–] NaibofTabr@infosec.pub 1 points 20 hours ago

The technology enables the surveillance state. Therefore the technology is not amoral.