SFPD Flock Audit: 299 Illegal Federal Searches

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging into San Francisco's self-audit of its Flock Safety network, because the result is exactly what critics have warned about for years: a 'local' surveillance tool that doesn't stay local. San Francisco has some of the stricter rules on paper about who can query its ALPR data, yet the audit still turned up 299 searches from out-of-state and federal entities that had no business touching the system. That's not a hypothetical slippery slope — that's the slope already happened.

This is the core problem with Flock's networked design. Once a city plugs its cameras into the national search infrastructure, the fine print in a local ordinance becomes a suggestion, not a wall. Agencies hundreds of miles away, including federal actors, can tap into a city's plate reads with little friction and even less accountability, especially when audits only happen after the fact and rely on the departments being honest about their own logs. San Francisco deserves some credit for auditing itself at all — most cities running Flock never bother. But 'we checked and it was already compromised' is a hollow comfort.

If this can happen in a city with relatively tight restrictions, it can happen anywhere, which is exactly why we track deployments nationwide on the map. If your city runs Flock or is considering it, don't wait for an audit to tell you the data's already left the building — push for transparency and limits now through our take-action resources.