This post has been updated to add the rollout of identifiers.
Oops
To start with: things on this site were broken for a bit, now they’re not. I can give you technical mumbojumbo, but the long and the short of it is that I was doing stuff, and forgot to run a job when I was done. Oops.
Footage Sharing Map
In better news: a footage sharing map is now live!
This map shows the “1:1 sharing agreements” between agencies. These agreements enable sharing of footage and other data for use in the Search Tool — this allows lookups of partial plates, vehicle makes and models, bumper stickers, and who knows what else.
It is important to understand the massive data gap in this map. Take the example of McDonough, GA:
The agency reports that it has agreements with 1409 others agencies.
Only 1 of those 1409 agencies reports the same thing.
Fewer than one in 700 agencies report this sharing agreement.
That’s a single sample, but you’ll see similar patterns when exploring the map: the number of actual agreements is undoubtedly orders of magnitude larger than the number reported.
The map reflects the 700 or so transparency portals we know about, only some of which report sharing agreements. That’s out of an estimated 5,000+ agencies. I’d say “do the math,” but you can’t — the numbers are secret.
California Love
Note: The California out-of-state reports mentioned below have been discontinued. The methodology for detecting out-of-state sharing proved unreliable as Flock’s network topology changed.
On the subject of sharing, two reports were added:
California out of state searchesCalifornia out of state agencies
The criteria for searches and agencies to be listed were:
- A search must be seen in a non-California audit log.
- The search must be of >60,000 devices.
A California agency showing up in out-of-state logs performing searches at a national scale strongly implied that the agency was on the national network.
The national sharing network is generally said to be reciprocal in nature.
The fact that these agencies searched out-of-state networks was not, in itself, evidence that they were engaging in reciprocal data sharing, but it raised questions given Flock’s prior statements on the nature of its network.
If you are in California and you know more about this, please get in touch!
Identifiers
Identifiers, briefly discussed in a previous post, have now been added throughout the site.
When you look up a plate or check the details on a report, you will see an identifier like “c9d1a0f5b” with a link to the license plate lookup tool.
Every license plate is mapped to a unique identifier[1], which can be used throughout the application. This makes research possible without a need to disclose license plates.
More Logs, More Problems
And, finally, a thank you to everyone who has contributed the results of their FOIAs, CORAs, PRAs, and other open records requests!
This week we added logs from Washington, Georgia, and California — the total count now stands at over 40,000,000 searches indexed. This covers less than an 18 month period, and for the most part excludes local searches.
More info on source files can be found here.[2]
Unrelated to this website (as far as we know), a Police Chief in Braselton, GA, was arrested on suspicion of using the Flock system for stalking.
You can see what his searches looked like in the new long-term tracking tool.
For those keeping track at home: yes, it’s the first eight characters of the plate’s SHA256 hash. It’s not a secret algorithm designed to hide the plates in the agency-published logs. ↩︎
A better system to deal with source files is in the works, but until then, you can view them on the page linked. ↩︎