Audit confirmed federal agencies accessed Woodburn Flock Safety camera network

Our Take

Credit to KATU News for digging into what Flock Safety and its police partners would rather you not think about too hard: once a city plugs into this network, it's not just local cops looking at the data. Woodburn's audit reportedly confirmed what skeptics have said for years — federal agencies got access to a local ALPR system that was sold to residents as a tool for solving car break-ins and stolen vehicles. That's the bait-and-switch at the heart of Flock's business model, and Woodburn deserves credit for actually pulling the plug instead of issuing a statement and moving on.

This matters because "local control" of these camera networks is mostly fiction. Flock's architecture is built for data sharing across agency lines, which means a small-town city council vote to approve a handful of cameras can end up feeding a federal surveillance pipeline nobody on that council ever approved. Residents are told the system is about catching car thieves; the fine print says otherwise. When a city has to run an audit just to find out who's actually been looking at its residents' movements, something has already gone wrong with oversight before day one.

Woodburn shutting its network down is a rare win, but it's not the end of the story — plenty of nearby jurisdictions are still running these cameras with the same lax federal-access terms. Check our camera map to see what's logging plates near you, and if you want to push your own city council toward the kind of audit Woodburn finally did, our take-action page has the playbook.