Researchers filed two FOIA requests with the Danville, Illinois police department, and the data they received revealed over 4,000 state and national Flock searches made by local police departments on behalf of federal agencies ^{(archive link)}. The data was shared with 404Media, who published the results on May 27, 2025.

You can view the FOIA data yourself: first request and second request.

The FOIA requests obtained search audit logs that show search requests made by other agencies for Danville, Illinois’ Flock surveillance network. Flock requires a “search reason” to be provided along with a search request; law enforcement personnel sometimes leave this field blank, according to our own findings, but most often use vague terms like “case” or “investigation”. The audit logs from Danville, Illinois found search request reasons like, “immigration”, “ICE,” “ICE+ERO,” (ICE’s Enforcement and Removal Operations), “illegal immigration,” “ICE WARRANT, and more.

404Media quoted Jay Stanley, a senior policy analyst at ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project: “f this kind of informal backdoor access to surveillance devices is allowed, then there’s functionally no limits to what systems ICE can tap into with no public oversight or control into what they are tapping into.”

The article uses the example of the Dallas, Texas police department: “When the Dallas Police Department, for example, performed a series of searches for ‘ICE+ERO’ on March 6, the department wasn’t just searching its own cameras, it was searching 6,674 different individual Flock camera networks composed of 77,771 total devices”, according to the data.

An anonymous source at Flock Safety said they were unaware, “but not surprised”, that Flock was being used by ICE in this way.

404Media also got a quote from Dave Maass, at the Electronic Frontier Foundation: “Law enforcement really likes license plate readers because of the lack of restrictions on that data. They don’t feel like they need a warrant. Oftentimes there are no restrictions whatsoever on what they search. … It might be totally true that some of these searches are for people who have warrants or who are wanted for criminal activity. They might be looking for a terrorist, who knows. But that’s kind of the point—we don’t know.”

Flock responded to 404Media’s questions by ducking responsibility for the widespread abuse of the mass surveillance system they built, emphasizing their claims that they had helped locate 1,000 missing people, and using the audit logs as an example of their deep concern for abuse of the system they built. They did not offer any statements that they would be adding any form of effective oversight to their system to prevent future abuse.

This story was also covered by Reason ^{(archive link)}.