Flock Safety LIED... AGAIN! ACLU Reports on Flock's Pattern of Lying to Cities, PDs & the Public
The short version: A new ACLU report says Flock Safety told a Wisconsin council its cameras don't build vehicle heat maps — a claim that was false and cost it the contract within a day.
Our Take
Credit to Verified Privacy VPN for digging into the ACLU's findings here, because the story isn't really about license plate readers — it's about what happens when a local council takes a vendor's word for it. Oshkosh asked a direct question about tracking capability, got a direct answer, and that answer turned out to be false. The contract died in about 24 hours once the truth came out. That's the exception. In most towns, nobody checks.
We watch this same pattern in the data center world every week: a company tells a planning board its cooling system uses minimal water, or that the substation upgrade won't touch residential rates, or that the tax abatement will pay for itself in jobs. Those claims get read into the record, a vote gets taken, and the verification — if it ever comes — arrives years later, after the deal is signed and the leverage is gone. Flock had roughly 5,000 of these contracts running before one council bothered to fact-check the pitch.
The lesson for anyone sitting on a council right now, whether the ask is a camera network or a gigawatt campus, is the same: get the technical claims in writing, get an independent party to verify them, and don't let a sales rep's assurance stand in for due diligence. Check our facility map for how these approval patterns show up near you, and see take-action for how to push your local body to ask the harder questions before the vote, not after.
This is GridWatch the USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Verified Privacy VPN (vp.net), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.