Flock's case-number rule is an honour system, and the company says it never checks

Flock, the police-technology company whose network includes some 120,000 automatic license plate readers around the US, announced changes last Thursday meant to stop officers from using the platform for illegal or illegitimate purposes ^[1][2]. The headline control is a requirement that anyone running a search enter a criminal case number, alongside software that flags abnormal searches ^[3]. Flock confirmed to MIT Technology Review that it does not verify those case numbers, so an officer can simply enter a bogus one ^[4].

That is the entire lifecycle of an attestation-based safeguard in three sentences. The control asks the user to assert a fact, records the assertion, and never tests it. For anyone acting in good faith it adds a field to a form. For anyone acting in bad faith it adds a field to a form.

The population this control is aimed at is not hypothetical. The Washington Post recently identified 50 cases in which officers misused systems from Flock and its competitors, often to stalk and harass women ^[5]. One woman in Wisconsin alleged that her officer ex-boyfriend searched for her car 179 times ^[6]. Another was being stalked by the chief of police, with nobody to report him to ^[7]. MIT Technology Review notes that officers have already lied to get around other Flock safeguards ^[8]. A safeguard whose only failure mode is "the user types something untrue" is being deployed against people who have demonstrated they will type something untrue.

The alternative is not exotic, and MIT Technology Review spells it out: require case numbers that match the police department's own records ^[9]. That is a more intrusive integration, and it is the reason it does not exist. Verification means writing connectors to hundreds of records systems, handling the department that has no queryable case management at all, and accepting that some legitimate searches will now fail. Attestation costs one text input and ships this quarter. The difference between the two is not diligence, it is a build decision, and the audit trail is where it shows up: an unverified number tells an investigator nothing later, while a matched one points at a real file ^[9].

The same pattern repeats in Flock's retention story. Flock says 90% of searches happen within a week of an incident, and the company recently changed its recommended retention period to seven days ^[10][11]. Recommended. Agencies can hold data for as long as they like, and because Flock mostly operates as a national network, police in one city or state can search data collected in another and retain it for months or years ^[11][12]. A recommendation is an attestation with the officer removed: a stated norm with no enforcement surface ^[13].

There is a version of this system with a real constraint rather than a stated one. MIT Technology Review's example is scoping the broadest access to emergencies, so that searches tied to an active Amber Alert can reach data from surrounding cities ^[14], with kidnappings and missing persons being the use case Flock cites more than any other ^[15].

Watch whether Flock ships records-system integration or leaves the field unverified, and watch the venue. Cities are already cancelling contracts and states are trying to pass laws limiting or banning plate readers ^[16]. Chad Marlow, a senior policy counsel at the ACLU, told MIT Technology Review that the best way to set limits on surveillance is not new Flock guidelines but new laws ^[17].