Last Thursday, the Joplin Police Department announced an officer “is no longer employed by the City of Joplin” after an investigation into suspected stalking via Flock’s license plate reader system.
The department didn’t discover this. Citizens did—by reading audit logs that haveibeenflocked.com published, finding patterns that fourteen months of agency oversight had missed, and reporting them.
Today, 404 Media ran an article about this site and Flock’s takedown attempts. The reporting is accurate. But both 404 Media and the EFF frame unredacted license plates as “leaked” or “missed redactions.”
They’re wrong. The plates are the point.
The legal reality
Flock’s entire business model depends on license plates being unprotected information. If plates were regulated like SSNs or medical records, Flock couldn’t operate—collection would require warrants, sharing would require consent, and the nationwide dragnet would be illegal.
Flock chose this legal regime. They benefit from it every time a camera captures a plate without a warrant, every time that data flows to thousands of agencies without restriction, every time a cop searches the network without probable cause.
But that same legal framework means audit logs are public records.
As I’ve documented, agencies have no lawful basis for redacting plates precisely because plates aren’t protected information. You can’t claim data is too sensitive for public records while simultaneously arguing it’s not sensitive enough to require a warrant.
Flock wants regulatory immunity and operational secrecy. That’s not a coherent legal position—it’s lobbying.
This legal vacuum enables the abuse we’ve seen in Georgia, Kansas, Colorado, and now Joplin. It also makes unredacted audit logs the only functional check on that abuse.
Where I part with the EFF
The EFF has done—and continues to do—important work. But on this, we disagree.
Their position treats plate exposure as a privacy harm to be minimized. Mine treats it as the precondition for accountability. As long as Flock can collect this information without restriction, the public must be able to see how it’s used—including who searched whom, and when.
Redacting audit logs doesn’t protect the surveilled. It protects the surveillers.
As long as Flock can have the information, you should too.