Albany Co. Sheriff's Office investigator accused of misusing Flock cameras

Our Take

Credit to WTEN for breaking this one: a senior investigator in Albany County's Criminal Investigations Unit, Laurie Moore, is now facing misdemeanor charges for allegedly tapping into Flock Safety camera data to snoop on a former girlfriend. This is exactly the scenario privacy advocates have been shouting about since these networks went up — not a hacker, not a foreign adversary, but an insider with a badge and a login who decided the rules didn't apply to her.

Flock and its police partners love to pitch these systems as tightly audited, access-controlled, and reserved for serious crime. But an audit trail only matters if someone is actually checking it and willing to prosecute what they find. Here, the safeguard that worked was an investigation and an arrest after the fact — not a system that prevented the misuse in the first place. Every plate scan sitting in that database is a record of where someone was and when, and this case shows exactly how easily that power can be turned into a personal surveillance tool.

Albany County is just one node in a sprawling, largely unregulated network of ALPR cameras blanketing American roads. If you want to see how close this kind of surveillance infrastructure is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you think your town shouldn't be writing blank checks for this kind of access, see what you can do on our take-action page.