Woodburn's Own Audit Caught Border Patrol Searching Its Flock Cameras

Our Take

Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging through Woodburn's audit line by line, because this is exactly the kind of paperwork most people never see until it's too late. The city told residents its plate data stayed local. Oregon's sanctuary law says immigration enforcement shouldn't get near it. And yet a feature called National Lookup quietly made the whole network searchable by Border Patrol and DHS anyway. Nobody voted on that. Nobody signed off on it in public. It just existed inside the software, waiting to be switched on.

This is the pattern we keep seeing nationwide: a city council is sold a narrow, local use case, and the actual system ships with national reach baked in by default. Vendors build the plumbing once and let every department flip switches most officials don't even know exist. When a city says 'we disabled it once we found out,' that's not accountability, that's damage control after the fact. The policy was never the problem. The architecture was.

If you live somewhere with Flock cameras, don't take the city's word for what's turned on. Check our camera map to see what's near you, and use our take-action resources to push your council for a real audit, not a press release.