Please Let Us Know How To Pay #flock #foia

Our Take

Credit to Magnetic Norse for pulling the thread on Michigan's statewide Flock contract (MA250000000832) and getting back an answer that only makes sense in bureaucratic doublespeak: the state certifies there's no purchasing activity or admin fees on record, while attached in the very same response are emails from Flock's own account executive reporting $324,000 in sales and asking twice how to pay the one-percent kickback the contract requires. Both statements get filed as true. Nobody gets blamed. That's the trick.

This is exactly the kind of gap we keep running into at DeFlock: the paper trail exists, the money moves, the cameras go up — but the recordkeeping that's supposed to let the public follow any of it stays conveniently blank until someone files a FOIA and forces the contradiction into daylight. A state can run an entire vendor relationship worth hundreds of thousands of dollars through a contract and still tell its own residents, on paper, that there's nothing to report. Multiply that by every county and school district buying off the same statewide deal and you start to see how little oversight is actually happening behind the scanning of your plate.

If you want to see what any of this hardware looks like once it's actually bolted to a pole in your town, check our camera map, and if you want to push back on a deployment near you, our take-action page has the tools to start asking the same kind of questions Magnetic Norse just did.