Edmonds Cancels Flock Contract Over Federal Access to State Cameras
The short version: Edmonds, WA just became the third Snohomish County city to dump Flock Safety after learning federal agencies could tap into local ALPR data, as covered by Verified Privacy VPN.
Our Take
Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for tracking this pattern, because it's a pattern worth watching. Edmonds isn't an isolated case of buyer's remorse — it's the third Snohomish County city to pull the plug on Flock once officials realized the real terms of the deal: once a camera network is live, federal agencies can often query it too, contract language or not. Local councils keep discovering that 'our cameras, our rules' was never really true.
This is the core problem with ALPR networks that DeFlock has been flagging for years. Cities sign up thinking they're buying a tool for solving local car thefts, and instead they've plugged their streets into a national surveillance grid that ICE, the FBI, and whoever else can request access to, often with minimal transparency and no local vote. When three cities in one county start canceling contracts in the same stretch, that's not noise — that's a community deciding the tradeoff isn't worth it.
If you want to know whether your own city has quietly wired itself into this network, check our camera map before assuming it hasn't. And if Edmonds' city council can walk this back, so can yours — see our take-action resources for how to make that case locally.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.