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Title: Cops Searched Thousands of Flock Cameras for Reasons of 'LMAO,' 'IDK,'
'Hehe,' And 'Asdfg'

Link: https://yro.slashdot.org/story/26/09/15/00322...

404 Media reports: Last summer, a cop with the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's
Department used Flock's surveillance search engine to look for a license
plate across more than 19,000 cameras in 1,558 cities and towns. The cop's
stated reason for the search, according to a record of Flock's system, was
"LMAO." The cop is one of dozens who put gibberish, jokes, or other nonsense
into Flock's "reason" box, highlighting the casualness and lack of care some
cops have when searching an incredibly powerful surveillance system. This is
on top of the thousands upon thousands of cops who simply wrote something
like "investigation," "test," or left the box blank as their search "reason,"
according to a new analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation and shared
with 404 Media. EFF's investigation found cops across dozens of jurisdictions
writing "LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe," "Haha," "idk," "blah," "TBD," and "robbery I
don't remember the case number leave me alone" in Flock's "reason" box for
searches. They found cops writing "idiot," "fuck this new search engine,"
"dickhead," "shithead," and "WEIRD KID" in the reason box. And they found an
entire class of police button mashers, who ran searches for reasons of
"asdfg," "gyghkkghghjkghjk," "jhjhjkhj," "jkhhkjhjk," "nmbvcbnm," and so on
and so forth. The searches came from police departments across the country
from 2023 through late 2025, when Flock changed how the "reason" box in its
search system functions... Each time a search is performed, a record of it is
saved in the Flock system, which can be obtained by the public using
government records requests. These audit logs show hundreds of thousands of
searches of the system; after 404 Media and other news outlets used these
types of logs to show police using the Flock system to look for undocumented
immigrants on behalf of ICE, a woman in Texas who had an abortion, and
protesters, cops were warned by government surveillance centers to be "as
vague as permissible" about the reasons for their searches... A police
department said it investigated a cop who wrote "driving around being weird"
in the reason field but found it was for "legitimate public safety purposes."
If a police chief "stood in front of a city council and asked for permission
to install hundreds of cameras just so his officers could investigate the
high crime of 'haha,' they would be laughed out of the room," argues the EFF
blog post, calling this proof that agencies can't be trusted to oversee
themselves. But judges aren't being asked to authorize searches or review
evidence, which the EFF post argues shows laws and courts haven't caught up
yet with a new technology. Whatever auditing happens is clearly "deficient,"
the EFF warns, and while many jurisdictions require by law an actual reason
for searches, "this keeps happening because police use automated license
plate readers as a convenient shortcut around constitutional privacy
safeguards." The EFF sees police officers "making a mockery of our civil
liberties" by logging reasons like "LOL", "LMAO", "sexy", and "idk" while
accessing sensitive location data. In fact, they argue the warrant-less
databases fostered a culture of abuse that "allowed police to treat a mass
surveillance network like their own personal search engine, permitting the
tracking of the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints,
personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols." Flock Safety claims
it has improved its system by requiring officers to select from a dropdown
list of crimes before running a search-but that only makes it easier for
officers to hide improper searches behind the veneer of uniformity. The
system does not require proof that the dropdown reason actually matches the
true purpose of the search... Since this update, officers are no longer
required to type out why they are digging through a driver's movement
history, and instead can select a pre-packaged option like "Traffic
infraction" or "Other" in half a second... Mass surveillance is incompatible
with a free society, and especially so when the people with access to this
data are treating it like a joke. This ALPR mass surveillance - the
indiscriminate, continuous collection and retention of location data on every
driver, regardless of suspicion - should not exist. But because it does, EFF
continues to urge courts and state legislatures to immediately step in and
impose strict, enforceable restrictions to rein in this abuse. At an absolute
minimum, this means mandating rigid data deletion deadlines and an ironclad
warrant requirement. If police want the power to track a person's movements,
they must be required to convince a judge with evidence and probable cause.
They should not be able to bypass the Constitution with a search for "haha."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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