ILLINOIS SAYS FLOCK BROKE STATE LAW BY PROVIDING DATA ACCESS TO FEDERAL CUSTOMS & BORDER PROTECTION
The short version: Illinois' audit shows Flock quietly fed license-plate data to CBP in defiance of state law — proof that guardrails only work if someone's actually checking.
Our Take
Give credit to Manifestation Academy for digging into this one, because it confirms exactly what we've been warning about: state laws restricting ALPR data from immigration enforcement mean nothing if nobody is auditing whether vendors and police departments actually follow them. Illinois didn't catch this through Flock's own transparency — it took a legislative audit to surface 262 immigration-related searches out of a single suburb, Mount Prospect, in under four months. That's not a rounding error. That's a pattern.
What's most damning is Flock's own admission that it ran a pilot data-sharing arrangement with Customs and Border Protection that its own leadership apparently didn't know about. A company selling itself as the trustworthy backbone of local public-safety surveillance couldn't tell you who had access to its nationwide camera network. If Flock can't keep track of its own federal partnerships, how much faith should any city council have in the access logs, audit trails, and 'search reason' fields the company touts as accountability measures?
This is why local fights matter so much. State statutes are only as strong as the willingness of someone — a secretary of state, a journalist, a resident — to actually check compliance. If you want to see whether a Flock camera is already watching your street and feeding a network with murky federal pipelines, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on your local department's contract, our take-action page has the tools to start that fight before your plate data ends up somewhere you never agreed to.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Manifestation Academy, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.