Benn Jordan | ALPR DATA LEAK RESPONSIBILITY

Our Take

Credit to Jen and Benn Jordan for surfacing exactly the kind of story we warn about constantly: someone finally gets a look behind the curtain of Flock's surveillance network, finds mistakes tied to their own identity, and the response from government isn't to fix the errors — it's to make sure nobody can check for errors again. That's not a coincidence. That's the playbook. When transparency starts to expose sloppy data practices, the instinct in statehouses from Arizona to anywhere else is to legislate the problem out of public view rather than out of existence.

This matters because ALPR systems like Flock aren't just photographing your plate — they're building a location history on you, searchable by thousands of agencies, often with minimal audit trails and plenty of room for human error or misuse. Public records requests are one of the only tools ordinary people have to verify that this dragnet is even working correctly, let alone being used lawfully. Gut that process and you've effectively removed the one check citizens had on a system that was sold to them as 'just for solving crimes.'

If you want to see how saturated your own neighborhood already is with these cameras, check our camera map, and if you're in a state facing similar bills to wall off ALPR records, our take-action page has tools to push back before the paper trail disappears for good.