'Have I Been Flocked' Researcher Says Over 400 Illinois Agencies Have Surveillance Network Access

Our Take

This is the story we keep telling: one small-town police department flips on a Flock camera to catch stolen cars, and suddenly its plate-read database is quietly wired into hundreds of other agencies across the state. Forbes is covering the work of the researcher behind Have I Been Flocked, who used a simple public records request to expose Schaumburg, Illinois sharing access with reportedly over 400 law enforcement and government entities. Multiply that by every town running Flock and you start to see the real shape of the network — not a patchwork of local tools, but a de facto national tracking system nobody voted for.

The mechanism is almost always the same. A city council approves cameras for "traffic safety" or "stolen vehicle recovery," then Flock's data-sharing defaults quietly extend read access far beyond the jurisdiction that paid for the hardware. Residents in Schaumburg have no way of knowing which of those 400+ agencies can pull up their movements, for what reason, or for how long the data sits in someone else's system. That's the whole problem with ALPR sprawl: consent and oversight happen once, at the point of purchase, while surveillance reach keeps expanding indefinitely afterward.

Credit to the independent researcher for doing what most city councils won't — actually filing the records requests and mapping the sharing agreements. This is exactly the kind of grassroots accountability work this fight depends on. Check our camera map to see what's tracking your area, and hit take-action if you want to push back on the agreements nobody explained to you.