Flock's Network Was Used to Stalk. Former Officers Arrested

Key Takeaways

• The Georgia Bureau of Investigation arrested three former Savannah Police Department officers and one former civilian staff member for allegedly accessing Flock Safety's license plate reader system for non-law-enforcement purposes.
• The three former officers face two counts each of misuse of a license plate reader system and one count of violation of oath of office. The civilian faces two counts of misuse.
• The arrests follow an internal audit by Savannah police that noticed the behavior — and come weeks after broader reporting that police officers across the country were using license plate reader systems to track women they knew personally.
• Flock's growing controversy also includes its fastest-growing business segment: 60 mph police drones that can read license plates from up to 2,000 feet away.

The Georgia Bureau of Investigation announced last week that three former Savannah Police Department officers and one former civilian staff member have been arrested and charged with allegedly accessing Flock Safety's license plate reader system for non-law-enforcement purposes, according to reporting by TechSpot. 

The three former officers face two counts each of misuse of a license plate reader system and one count of violation of oath of office. The civilian staff member faces two counts of misuse.

The arrests followed an internal audit by the Savannah Police Department that flagged the behavior. The department investigated, dismissed those involved, and referred the case to the GBI. The offenses occurred while the individuals were employed by the department.

We covered Flock Safety before — specifically the company's plan to partner with dashcam company Nexar to turn 350,000 Uber and Lyft vehicles into mobile license plate readers for its surveillance network. 

These arrests are what the argument against ambient surveillance infrastructure looks like when it becomes concrete: not a hypothetical about what could go wrong, but four people charged with doing exactly what critics warned the system would enable.

What Flock's Network Actually Allows

The Savannah arrests are one instance of a documented pattern. Earlier in August, reporting emerged that a growing number of police officers across the country were using license plate reader systems to track women they knew personally — with Flock Safety identified as the primary tool being misused. 

The network scans and catalogs billions of license plates each month across a growing footprint of roadside cameras.

That scale is precisely what makes misuse so consequential. A surveillance network built to track vehicles across a wide geographic area, queryable by anyone with system access, is not a neutral tool that produces misuse only in rare cases of bad actors. 

It’s infrastructure that concentrates tracking capability in the hands of everyone with credentials — and credentials, as the Savannah case shows, don't stay within the boundaries of their intended use.

Flock's defenders point to the accountability that followed: an internal audit caught the behavior, the department acted, the GBI took the case. That process is working as it should. But it's worth noting what that process caught after the fact, not before: four people who had the access, used it improperly for an undetermined period, and were identified through an audit. 

The number of similar cases that haven't triggered an audit is unknown.

The Network Is Expanding

The arrests haven't slowed Flock's growth. TechSpot reports that the company's fastest-growing business segment is now 60 mph police drones capable of reading license plates from up to 2,000 feet.

The same network that roadside cameras feed now extends into the air and moving at vehicle speed.

There's also reporting that Flock cameras have produced significant false-positive rates, that the system has been used to associate vehicles with users' phones — creating a link between a license plate and a mobile device — and that a major investor in Flock also invests in a firm that can manipulate camera footage.

We've written in this series about ambient surveillance infrastructure and how it expands: a tool introduced for a specific and defensible purpose, early enforcement successes used to justify expanding it, use cases multiplying, and the hard accountability questions deferred until after the infrastructure is too embedded to question. 

Flock is a textbook case. Roadside cameras became a network. The network is being extended to drones. The drones will cover the gaps the cameras can't reach.

The Savannah arrests are the accountability process working. They're also a reminder that the accountability process is reactive — it catches misuse after it happens, and only when someone looks. The question worth asking before the drones are operational is whether we want to ask it after.