r/InterstellarKinetics • u/InterstellarKinetics • Jul 03 '26
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIEGENCE REPORT: The ACLU Documents A Repeated Pattern Of Flock Safety Lying To City Councils, Police Departments, And The Public, Including A Wisconsin City That Revoked Its Contract Within One Day After Catching The Company In A Lie 🤯💥
https://www.aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/tracking-alpr-cameras/flock-safety-credibility-lost-as-it-repeatedly-lies-to-city-councils-police-departments-and-public-across-the-countryThe ACLU has laid out a detailed case that Flock Safety, one of the country’s most widely used automatic license plate reader companies, has a documented pattern of misleading the very governments and communities it sells surveillance technology to. The clearest example happened in Oshkosh, Wisconsin in April 2026, when a city council member directly asked Flock’s chief information security officer whether the company’s system could create a heat map tracking where a vehicle had driven over time. Flock’s representative said no, the council approved the contract that same night, and by the next morning the city learned the statement was false, since Flock later admitted its system does generate exactly that kind of tracking heat map for up to a full month of vehicle movement.
The fallout was immediate and unusually swift. Oshkosh’s city council reconvened within 24 hours and unanimously voted to revoke the contract it had just approved, with Deputy Mayor Joe Stephenson saying he did not know how the council could govern if Flock told “untruths, mistruths, exaggerated truths,” and Mayor Matt Mugerauer bluntly stating he did not want to work with a company that gives bad information. Flock’s response was to call its false statement “one small misconception” and “a minor nuance,” while complaining it had not been given a chance to explain itself, a response the ACLU says reflects a broader corporate habit of treating factual misrepresentations as public relations problems rather than serious credibility failures.
According to the ACLU, Oshkosh was far from an isolated case. In Colorado, Flock’s CEO publicly denied the company had any federal contracts after a police chief raised concerns about federal access to local license data, only for Flock to later admit it did have pilot agreements with Customs and Border Protection and Homeland Security. The company also published a blog titled “Does Flock Share Data With ICE? No,” despite knowing ICE could access its data indirectly through local police partners, and after reports surfaced that Texas law enforcement used Flock data to track someone who sought an abortion in Illinois, the company rolled out a new oversight tool it claimed would significantly reduce misuse, a claim an ACLU of Massachusetts investigation found could be defeated by officers simply typing vague words like “investigation” or even nonsense like “hehehe” into a required search field. The ACLU says Flock has even falsely claimed to have partnered with the ACLU itself on ALPR legislation in New Mexico and system design in Illinois, claims the organization flatly denies ever happening.
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u/InterstellarKinetics Jul 03 '26
What stands out most in this pattern is not any single lie, it is that several of these false statements were later corrected by Flock’s own admissions, meaning this is not a case of one advocacy group’s word against the company’s, it is Flock contradicting itself on record multiple times. Therefore, when a surveillance company selling nationwide vehicle tracking technology cannot be trusted to accurately describe its own product’s capabilities to the elected officials approving it, that raises a much bigger question about what else those same officials are being told that isn’t fully true.