FLOCK GROUP INC has had some explaining to do this year. Billed as an intelligent platform that “unites communities, businesses, schools and law enforcement, combining their power to solve and deter crime together,” the vendor of automated license plate reader (ALPR) data has, in actuality, been accused of using data points from 83,000 cameras to help a sheriff’s deputy in Texas track one of the state’s citizens as she fled to Illinois — a state where the right to end a pregnancy is protected — following a self-administered abortion in the Lone Star State.
The Ohio State Highway Patrol has a contract to give the company $90,000 per year.
Considering the current lax attitude toward ALPR data sharing by Ohio’s state government, that’s too much, says Gary Daniels, a legislative director at the Ohio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union.
“Given [the lack of regulation], we think it is irresponsible of our state and local governments to be purchasing, obtaining, or using these types of mass surveillance devices and technologies with no adequate statutory safeguards in place governing their use,” Daniels told Scene in an October 8 email.
The highway patrol is not alone among Ohio entities in giving the firm business. The Cleveland Division of Police signed its most recent contract with Flock, for $250,000, on the 1st of May of this year, and the division of police in the state capital, Columbus, signed a $228,000 contract covering 2 years of service in late 2023. (Cincinnati signed a 90-day trial agreement with the company in 2024; it was allowed to expire.)
But the state highway patrol contract is particularly relevant because it flies in the face of Ohio voters’ 2023 passage of constitutional protections for abortions, says Sarah T. Hamid, associate director of activism at the Electronic Frontier Foundation.
| “When Ohio voters constitutionally protected the right to make reproductive decisions and travel for healthcare, they didn’t intend for their state to subsidize the very surveillance tools that can criminalize those choices.” — Sarah T. Hamid, Electronic Frontier Foundation |
“Ohio’s $90,000 annual expenditure on Flock Safety’s surveillance network directly contradicts the state’s constitutional commitment to reproductive freedom,” Hamid wrote in an October 10 email to Scene.
“The recent Johnson County, Texas case — where a sheriff’s deputy used Flock’s network to search over 83,000 cameras across multiple states to track an individual who had a self-managed abortion — demonstrates exactly how this surveillance infrastructure can be weaponized against people exercising their reproductive rights. When Ohio voters constitutionally protected the right to make reproductive decisions and travel for healthcare, they didn’t intend for their state to subsidize the very surveillance tools that can criminalize those choices.”
The EFF has written about the case in detail on its website, bringing significant national attention to the issue.
In 2023, Ohio voters approved Issue 1, a ballot measure which added protections for abortion rights to the state constitution. The move was widely viewed as a response to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization case, which effectively overturned the federal abortion protections enforced since the Roe v. Wade decision of 1973. Ballot measures have become a popular way for residents of states with gerrymandered legislatures to work around the more hidebound members of their state assemblies, which do not necessarily reflect the views of their constituents. Ohio Issue 1 is often cited as an example of the trend.
An OSHP spokesperson, Sgt. Tyler Ross, was asked via email whether the state policing organization was looking at dropping its contract with Flock in light of the Texas incident and Ohio’s constitutional abortion protections. Ross sent back the the following statement:
“The Ohio State Highway Patrol uses Flock Safety as a tool to help improve public safety and support our mission of protecting the community. These cameras assist the Patrol to identify and locate stolen vehicles, identify suspects in criminal investigations, and respond more quickly to alerts about missing or endangered persons.”
A lucrative business
The list of financial backers who have a stake in Flock, which is headquartered in Atlanta, reads like a who’s-who of Silicon Valley giants, with funders including Y Combinator, Bedrock Capital, Tiger Global Management and Andreessen Horowitz, according to the corporate relationships database LittleSis.
And when it comes to the firm’s corporate ties, tracking the movements of women’s bodies is hardly outside of the tone struck in the past: Flock’s flagship ALPR product is designed to be easily integrated with the offerings of Palintir, a surveillance vendor whose founder has been described as possibly the “most influential right-wing intellectual of the last 20 years” and is the one of the leading advocates for the dark enlightenment movement that hopes for an American absolute monarchy.
(Marc Andreessen of Flock funder Andreessen Horowitz is also said to be a dark enlightenment fan.)
Flock’s databases have access not only to cameras erected by law enforcement organizations, but to resources including corporate images from parking lots at places like Lowe’s and Home Depot, according to 404media.
In the case of the Texas/Illinois tracking incident, the outlet writes, the way authorities behaved “shows in stark terms how police in one state are able to take the ALPR technology … and turn it into a tool for finding people who have had abortions.”
The ALPR firm has agreements with more than 5,000 policing agencies across the U.S., according to company materials.
The list includes large conservative communities like Gilbert, AZ and Huntsville, AL, but it also covers many communities in California, a state often cited as being a stronghold for those defending abortion rights. That even includes Berkeley, which many Americans consider to be the template for a leftist university town. And at the state level, the California Highway Patrol has a multi-year contract with the company worth up to $3 million, according to documents obtained by Scene through a public records request. California governor Gavin Newsom recently vetoed a bill that would have regulated ALPR use in his state.
“This technology is ungovernable, given the number of agencies, interests, and impossibility of true compliance enforcement,” UC San Diego associate professor Lilly Irani told CalMatters in response to the veto. According to the outlet, law enforcement agencies in California have been caught recently breaking the law by sharing ALPR data with ICE and the border patrol. Similarly, an October study from the University of Washington Center for Human Rights came to the conclusion that there appeared to have been backdoor access by U.S. Border Patrol to the networks of at least 10 Washington-State police departments which did not explicitly authorize Border Patrol searches of their network data.
The discovery process for a September lawsuit found that a Virginia man had been tracked by the company’s cameras 526 times in four months.
Regarding the Texas abortion patient-tracking incident, Flock spokesperson Josh Thomas told Scene in August that the issue “has been well-covered as a clear missing person case, and not enforcement of abortion laws.”
“Our CEO Garrett responded here, and he also laid out many of the additional steps we’re taking to ensure Flock is used in compliance with local laws and statutes.”
But he also stated that Flock “is just one tool in the toolbox for police, as we don’t monitor or regulate other investigative techniques of law enforcement.”
That hands-off approach bit the company hard when in October, it was revealed in Texas media that the investigation had been focused on the abortion from day one, and that authorities had spoken falsely about finding “a large amount of blood” at the woman’s home.
The process of weaponizing legal action against women before packaging actions as a shepherding of their welfare has a history, says former Ohio state representative Jessica Miranda. Miranda was active in the passage of Issue 1 in 2023.
“Historically, policies intended to oppress women have been passed under the guise of protecting women,” Miranda wrote to Scene in October.
“The idea that Texas authorities would pretend to be helping a woman, when trying to prosecute her for using her right to choose, is morally appalling. As a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, I can say that it is stories like these which lead to women feeling distrusting of the systems meant to protect and safeguard them.”
Ohio state senator Beth Liston, who has also been active on the issue of abortion, says Issue 1 showed what Ohioans care about.
“Regarding Issue 1, people spoke loud and clear,” she wrote to Scene. “I was a part of the Physician lead initiative to fight for women’s health. However, much of the work was grassroots health providers who felt strongly about protecting patients, so I played a part but was just a small piece in a large movement of people. “
Thomas, the Flock spokesperson, did not respond to multiple additional requests for comment over the course of more than 2 months.
A beneficial tool
A spokesperson for Cleveland’s department of public safety stated in an email to Cleveland Scene that the Division of Police “uses Flock solely for crime-fighting purposes. As you have correctly pointed out, the State of Ohio has constitutional protections for abortion rights as Ohioans passed an amendment in November 2023 enshrining those rights in the State’s constitution. As such, we have not — nor will we ever — utilize this technology to track down anyone who has had an abortion like they did in Texas.”
That, of course, fixes only situations in which law enforcement officers in other jurisdictions do not lie about what they are doing when requesting data. In the Texas case, Johnson County Sheriff Adam King denied that the hunt was an abortion investigation, right up until the moment that EFF released documents showing the true nature of the undertaking.
In Cleveland, Flock is used by police for a variety of legitimate purposes. Police along the Cuyahoga arrested 10 young people in October after a spree of car thefts — a result that Flock data “played a pivotal role” in, according to press materials from the company.
The city is happy enough with Flock as a company that it is considering switching from ShotSpotter to a Flock product.
Miranda, the former state representative, says the company has a duty to make sure its products are used responsibly — a duty it is currently shirking.
“Private companies should be held accountable for their products,” Miranda stated. “Surveillance tools should be used to stop dangerous criminals, not women seeking reproductive healthcare.”
Overall, states Liston, the state senator, “women have the right to keep their reproductive health private. People in Ohio have said this loudly and clearly. The state should have no business tracking women down for personal health information.”
Daniels, of the ACLU of Ohio, states that the organization’s primary interest in the issue is “the passage of statewide laws to regulate the use of numerous types of surveillance technologies used by government, including Flock cameras/devices. Currently, there are no laws of that type here in Ohio. Inadequate, but still much better than nothing, would be local laws in those areas of Ohio where this type of technology used.”
However, he says, almost no regulations exist at the local levels, either.
For Hamid, of EFF, regulation is not sufficient: She says the camera networks simply cannot be used responsibly and must be disbanded.
“True protection of reproductive freedom requires recognizing that abortion access and mass surveillance are fundamentally incompatible,” Hamid stated.
“The strongest safeguard is not collecting this invasive data in the first place.”
Patrick Maynard’s freelance reporting has appeared in more than a dozen publications, including VICE News, Truthout, Sludge and The Independent. Public documents related to this article can be found here.
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