404 Media

2025-10-07 13:01:32

Police Said They Surveilled Woman Who Had an Abortion for Her 'Safety.' Court Records Show They Considered Charging Her With a Crime

In May, 404 Media reported that the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office in Texas searched a nationwide network of Flock cameras, a powerful AI-enabled license plate surveillance tool, to look for a woman who self-administered an abortion. At the time, the sheriff told us that the search had nothing to do with criminality and that they were concerned solely about the woman’s safety, specifically the idea that she could be bleeding to death from the abortion. Flock itself said “she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

But newly unearthed court documents about the incident show that when the search was performed, police were conducting a “death investigation” into the death of the fetus, and police discussed whether they could charge the woman with a crime with the District Attorney’s office on the same day that they performed the Flock search. The documents, obtained by the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and shared with 404 Media, also show that the Flock search was performed more than two weeks after the woman had the abortion. The documents were created as part of an arrest affidavit against the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her at gunpoint on the day she took the abortion pill.

In documents created prior to the publication of our article, there is zero mention of concern about the woman’s safety. The records show that the police retroactively created a separate document about the Flock search a week after our article was published, in which they justify the search by saying they were concerned for her safety.

404 Media’s initial reporting on the incident became national news, has been cited in several government investigations into how Flock is used by police, and has led to several reforms by Flock itself. The company and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly used it as a high-profile example of an ‘activist’ media that is biased against his company. The documents show that the narrative pushed by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and repeated by Flock is not the full story, and that police did consider charging the woman with a crime.

“For months, Flock Safety and the Johnson County Sheriff insisted that she was being searched for as a missing person and accused journalists and advocates of spreading 'clickbait' misinformation,” Rin Alajaji, legislative activist at the EFF, told 404 Media. “Now we have the official records, and they prove the exact opposite: Texas deputies did investigate this woman's abortion as a ‘death investigation,’ they did use Flock Safety’s ALPR network to track her down, and they did consult prosecutors about charging her. The only misinformation came from the company and the sheriff trying to cover their tracks. We’ve warned about this for over a decade now: when a single search can access more than 83,000 cameras across nearly the entire country, the potential for abuse is enormous. This makes it crystal clear that neither the companies profiting from this technology nor the agencies deploying it can be trusted to tell the full story about how it's being used.”

The documents highlight how Flock, whose cameras are installed in thousands of communities around the country, and which 404 Media has revealed police use on behalf of ICE, ultimately may not know what its customers are using the technology for. Flock declined to comment for this article.

According to the documents obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media, police came to the woman’s house to investigate the incident on May 9, after the woman’s partner called the police to report that she had an abortion on April 23, more than two weeks earlier. The arrest report states that they had opened a “death investigation case” regarding the fetus. The woman was not at the house at the time, though there is no indication in the arrest report that the man or the police were concerned about her whereabouts at the time.

“The incident of the abortion/miscarriage occurred on April 23, 2025,” an affidavit for the arrest of her partner says. The partner told police that he was “unaware” that the woman “had ordered a medication, off the internet, from California, that would cause her to abort or miscarry.”

The woman “aborted/miscarried while he was outside and he came in and found blood in the bathroom with what he believed was the non-viable fetus,” it says. They “got into a verbal argument and she left and had not been back to [the house] since that day. [He] collected what he thought was the fetus and put it in the freezer. When [he] was asked why he waited so long to report the incident, his answer was he had to process the event and call his family attorney.”

“Detective [Calvin] Miller [a detective on the scene] was provided FedEx packaging the pill was sent in, photographs of what [the man] believed to be a fetus and the instructions on how to take the medication,” it adds.

Crucially, the affidavit notes “it was discussed at the time with the District Attorney’s Office and learned the State could not statutorily charge [the woman] for taking the pill to cause the abortion or miscarriage of the non-viable fetus.”

That same day, Johnson County Sheriff’s Department officials searched the national Flock network—consisting at the time of 88,345 cameras across the country—for the license plate belonging to a Land Rover. The stated reason was “had an abortion, search for female.” The documents do not say the time when the conversation with the District Attorney about possibly charging the woman took place, so it is unclear whether this happened before or after the Flock search. The Johnson County Sheriff’s Office and District Attorney’s Office did not respond to requests for comment for this article sent via email, phone, and fax.

Several days later, on May 14, the woman went to the police and told them that she wanted to tell them her side of the story. According to the affidavit, she said that her partner assaulted her the day she took the pill, and she showed them text messages “where they discussed her ordering the pill and taking the pill.” At some point on April 23, the day she took the pill, the two began arguing. The woman said the man allegedly put a gun to her head in front of the couple’s toddler. She says that he hit her with the butt of the gun, threw her on the bed, choked her, put the gun to her head and demanded that she “beg for your life.” “Scream all you want, no one can hear you, no one is coming to help you,” he said, according to the arrest report. “I’ll kill you right now and take off with the baby.” The man was arrested and charged with assault on May 22.

On May 28, nearly a week after the woman’s partner was arrested for assault, 404 Media learned of the May 9 Flock search by the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office using records that were obtained using a public records request. The documents showed thousands of Flock searches throughout the United States, and the reason police stated for doing a given search. We learned that Johnson County performed a search on a Land Rover for the reason of “had an abortion, search for female,” which was particularly notable because abortion rights experts have worried that police surveillance would be turned against women seeking abortions.

On May 29, we reached out to Flock for comment on the incident. Flock told us that the stated reason for the search was not the full story, and that we should call Johnson County Sheriff Adam King to learn more (we had already reached out to the sheriff’s office for comment). “According to the sheriff's office, the deputy did not search for a woman seeking an abortion. In fact, it appears as though the woman may have had self-induced wounds from an unsafe abortion, and the family called the sheriff's office looking for her because she went missing,” a Flock spokesperson said at the time.

404 Media called King, and had a nine-minute phone call with him, during which he asked multiple members of his staff for details about why the search was done and what happened. King told 404 Media that “I wanted to make sure y’all understood what that was: It wasn’t us trying to block a woman from having an abortion. It was a self-administered abortion she gave herself and her family was worried that she was going to bleed to death, and we were trying to find her to get her to a hospital. We weren’t trying to block her from leaving the state or whatever. That wasn’t the case. We just wanted to get her some medical help and that’s why we did the query on Flock.”

“The family was worried she was bleeding and needed immediate medical attention and we weren’t able to get her on the phone, they weren’t able to get her on the phone, that’s why we were checking Flock trying to find her, but it was for her safety,” he said. “That’s all it was about, her safety.”

The only family member mentioned in the court documents is the woman’s partner, who was arrested for allegedly abusing and threatening her. The Flock search is also not mentioned in the court documents, but it makes clear that the police were told at the time they learned about the abortion that it had actually taken place more than two weeks prior. There is no mention of concern about the woman’s safety in the narrative of events in the arrest report, though there is discussion of police considering whether they would be allowed to charge her with a crime.

On June 5, more than a week after 404 Media’s article was published and following subsequent national attention on the story, the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office created a new “supplemental report” about the incident in which the officer who ran the Flock search retroactively explained that he was worried about the woman’s safety and used both Flock and another powerful surveillance tool, TLO, to look her up. This supplemental report was also obtained by the EFF and shared with 404 Media.

“Deputies started to ask communication’s [sic] about looking up the victim due to a large amount of blood being found in the residence,” it states. “I never made scene on this call, just was assisting with trying to locate the victim and her children to check their welfare. I began to believe the victim may have been hurt by the [reporting person, the woman’s partner] due to the call and it not making sense […] I wanted to use resources available to help find where the victim and her children could be to make sure they were okay.”

The report, which does not mention the word “abortion” anywhere, then states that they found her license plate and an address in Dallas. The officer ran a Flock search as well as “a TLO report,” which gave him an additional address to search. TLO is a powerful lookup tool that uses information pulled from credit report header data. 404 Media has reported extensively on this tool in the past.
The case supplemental report shows it was created only after our article was initially publishedFrom the case supplemental report, created June 5
“I entered the vehicle into FLOCK to see if we could see where the victim and her children might be at due to multiple different locations being given for the victim and her children. Deputies had attempted to try and contact the female, but were unsuccessful. The FLOCK hit showed the victim had been in Dallas prior but nothing recent. The reason for the FLOCK search was to find out what city the victim and her children might be in and give us an idea of where to look for them, due to the large area of where the victim and her children cold [sic] be at.”

On June 13, King separately told the Dallas Morning News that “There was no big conspiracy there to be the abortion police [...] That wasn’t our deal, it was all about her safety.” The Dallas Morning News cited a “partial report” that it obtained which appears to be this June 5 document, which notes the “large amount of blood.”

Since we first reported on this incident, Flock and its CEO, Garrett Langley, have repeatedly stated that our reporting on the incident and an EFF blog post about it was “clickbait,” misleading, and that it oversold what happened in Johnson County. It is not clear if Flock has seen the arrest report or what Johnson County Sheriff’s Office told the company. But Flock and Langley have used King’s initial narrative of the incident to criticize media reporting of the company.

“In this case, it was an unfortunate example of where an activist journalist had a narrative in their mind and they didn’t want to look at the facts of the story, because the facts are, we have one of the most transparent systems one could build,” Langley told Forbes last month. “There was a single word ‘abortion,’ in the search. The natural conclusion is, ‘Oh, they’re searching for this woman because she had an abortion.’ But when you talk to the police department, it’s actually quite a more nuanced story, which is the family called the police department because they were worried for her well-being. It was a missing person’s case because she did administer a self-abortion. They found that woman not too far away eventually. And so when I look at this, I go ‘This is everything’s working as it should be.’”

“A family was concerned for a family member. They used Flock to help find her when she could have been unwell. She was physically OK, which is great, but due to the current political climate, this was really good clickbait,” Langley said.

The only adult “family member” of the woman who’s mentioned in police reports is her partner, who the woman left after he attacked her with a gun.

Flock and Langley also posted a blog in the aftermath of our reporting and the EFF’s own blog post about the incident in which he said the story was “clickbait-driven reporting and social media rumors,” about the case, and that the Texas abortion case “was purposefully misleading reporting.”

The EFF, he wrote, “is actively perpetuating narratives that have been proven false, even after the record has been corrected.”

“The Sheriff’s Office has reported that a local family called to ask for help–a relative had self-administered an abortion and subsequently ran away. Her family feared she was hurt and asked the Sheriff’s deputy to search for her to the best of their abilities. Deputies performed a nationwide search in Flock, the broadest search possible within the system, to try to locate her as quickly as they could,” Langley wrote. “Luckily, she was found safe and healthy in Dallas a couple of days later. No charges were ever filed against the woman and she was never under criminal investigation by Johnson County. She was being searched for as a missing person, not as a suspect of a crime.”

King, the Johnson County Sheriff, previously told 404 Media Flock was not responsible for ultimately finding the woman.

Separately, King was arrested by his own deputies in August on charges of harassing multiple female members of his staff and threatening to arrest them after they reported the harassment. King allegedly made repeated comments about the women’s appearance. Last week, King was additionally charged with aggravated perjury after allegedly lying to a grand jury about what happened. As part of his bond agreement, he has been ordered by a court to not perform background checks on his alleged victims, is not allowed access to “Global Positioning System Data” from Johnson County, and is not allowed access to a video surveillance system owned by the county.

“This update is so disappointing,” a Flock source said when 404 Media told them about the new details of the case. 404 Media granted multiple current and former Flock employees anonymity because they were not permitted to speak to the press. “As much as Flock tries to be good stewards of the powerful tech we sell, this shows it really is up to users to serve their communities in good faith. Selling to law-enforcement is tricky because we assume they will use our tech to do good and then just have to hope we're right.”

The Flock source added “Even if Flock took a stance on permitted use-cases, a motivated user could simply lie about why they're performing a search. We can never 100% know how or why our tools are being used.” A second Flock source said they believe Flock should develop a better idea of what its clients are using the company’s technology for.

“Reproductive dragnets are not hypothetical concerns. These surveillance tactics open the door for overzealous, anti-abortion state actors to amass data to build cases against people for their abortion care and pregnancy outcomes,” Ashley Kurzweil, senior policy analyst in reproductive health and rights at the National Partnership for Women & Families, told 404 Media. “Law enforcement exploitation of mass surveillance infrastructure for reproductive health criminalization promises to be increasingly disruptive to the entire abortion access and pregnancy care landscape. The prevalence of these harmful data practices and risks of legal action drive real fear among abortion seekers and helpers—even intimidating people from getting the care they need,” she added.

“Given Flock's total failure to prevent abuses, law enforcement that have paid for this surveillance technology should immediately lock down their settings for which other agencies can access their data, and should seriously reconsider whether this technology should be installed in their communities in the first place,” Senator Ron Wyden told 404 Media in a statement. “And Republican officials need to stop harassing and harming women.”

Johnson County sheriff allowed to return to work after latest indictment

King was elected sheriff in 2016. He previously served as commander of the South Texas Officers and Prosecutors Human Trafficking Task Force.

^{Doug Myers (CBS Texas)}

404 Media

2025-08-25 20:56:35

CBP Had Access to More than 80,000 Flock AI Cameras Nationwide

Customs and Border Protection (CBP) regularly searched more than 80,000 Flock automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, according to data released by three police departments. The data shows that CBP’s access to Flock’s network is far more robust and widespread than has been previously reported. One of the police departments 404 Media spoke to said it did not know or understand that it was sharing data with CBP, and Flock told 404 Media Monday that it has “paused all federal pilots.”

In May, 404 Media reported that local police were performing lookups across Flock on behalf of ICE, because that part of the Department of Homeland Security did not have its own direct access. Now, the newly obtained data and local media reporting reveals that CBP had the ability to perform Flock lookups by itself.

Last week, 9 News in Colorado reported that CBP has direct access to Flock’s ALPR backend “through a pilot program.” In that article, 9 News revealed that the Loveland, Colorado police department was sharing access to its Flock cameras directly with CBP. At the time, Flock said that this was through what 9 News described as a “one-to-one” data sharing agreement through that pilot program, making it sound like these agreements were rare and limited:

“The company now acknowledges the connection exists through a previously publicly undisclosed program that allows Border Patrol access to a Flock account to send invitations to police departments nationwide for one-to-one data sharing, and that Loveland accepted the invitation,” 9 News wrote. “A spokesperson for Flock said agencies across the country have been approached and have agreed to the invitation. The spokesperson added that U.S. Border Patrol is not on the nationwide Flock sharing network, comprised of local law enforcement agencies across the country. Loveland Police says it is on the national network.”

New data obtained using three separate public records requests from three different police departments gives some insight into how widespread these “one-to-one” data sharing agreements actually are. The data shows that in most cases, CBP had access to more Flock cameras than the average police department, that it is regularly using that access, and that, functionally, there is no difference between Flock’s “nationwide network” and the network of cameras that CBP has access to.

According to data obtained from the Boulder, Colorado Police Department by William Freeman, the creator of a crowdsourced map of Flock devices called DeFlock, CBP ran at least 118 Flock network searches between May 13 and June 13 of this year. Each of these searches encompassed at least 6,315 individual Flock networks (a “network” is a specific police department or city’s cameras) and at least 82,000 individual Flock devices. Data obtained in separate requests from the Prosser Police Department and Chehalis Police Department, both in Washington state, also show CBP searching a huge number of networks and devices.

A spokesperson for the Boulder Police Department told 404 Media that “Boulder Police Department does not have any agreement with U.S. Border Patrol for Flock searches. We were not aware of these specific searches at the time they occurred. Prior to June 2025, the Boulder Police Department had Flock's national look-up feature enabled, which allowed other agencies from across the U.S. who also had contracts with Flock to search our data if they could articulate a legitimate law enforcement purpose. We do not currently share data with U.S. Border Patrol. In June 2025, we deactivated the national look-up feature specifically to maintain tighter control over Boulder Police Department data access. You can learn more about how we share Flock information on our FAQ page.”

A Flock spokesperson told 404 Media Monday that it sent an email to all of its customers clarifying how information is shared from agencies to other agencies. It said this is an excerpt from that email about its sharing options:

“The Flock platform provides flexible options for sharing:

National sharing

1. Opt into Flock’s national sharing network. Access via the national lookup tool is limited—users can only see results if they perform a full plate search and a positive match exists within the network of participating, opt-in agencies. This ensures data privacy while enabling broader collaboration when needed.
2. Share with agencies in specific states only
   
   1. Share with agencies with similar laws (for example, regarding immigration enforcement and data)

   
   

3. Share within your state only or within a certain distance
   
   1. You can share information with communities within a specified mile radius, with the entire state, or a combination of both—for example, sharing with cities within 150 miles of Kansas City (which would include cities in Missouri and neighboring states) and / or all communities statewide simultaneously.

   
   

4. Share 1:1
   
   1. Share only with specific agencies you have selected

   
   

5. Don’t share at all”

In a blog post Monday, Flock CEO Garrett Langley said Flock has paused all federal pilots.

“While it is true that Flock does not presently have a contractual relationship with any U.S. Department of Homeland Security agencies, we have engaged in limited pilots with the U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and Homeland Security Investigations (HSI), to assist those agencies in combatting human trafficking and fentanyl distribution,” Langley wrote. “We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users […] All federal customers will be designated within Flock as a distinct ‘Federal’ user category in the system. This distinction will give local agencies better information to determine their sharing settings.”

A Flock employee who does not agree with the way Flock allows for widespread data sharing told 404 Media that Flock has defended itself internally by saying it tries to follow the law. 404 Media granted the source anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the press.

“They will defend it as they have been by saying Flock follows the law and if these officials are doing law abiding official work then Flock will allow it,” they said. “However Flock will also say that they advise customers to ensure they have their sharing settings set appropriately to prevent them from sharing data they didn’t intend to. The question more in my mind is the fact that law in America is arguably changing, so will Flock just go along with whatever the customers want?”

The data shows that CBP has tapped directly into Flock’s huge network of license plate reading cameras, which passively scan the license plate, color, and model of vehicles that drive by them, then make a timestamped record of where that car was spotted. These cameras were marketed to cities and towns as a way of finding stolen cars or solving property crime locally, but over time, individual cities’ cameras have been connected to Flock’s national network to create a huge surveillance apparatus spanning the entire country that is being used to investigate all sorts of crimes and is now being used for immigration enforcement. As we reported in May, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) has been gaining access to this network through a side door, by asking local police who have access to the cameras to run searches for them.

9 News’s reporting and the newly released audit reports shared with 404 Media show that CBP now has direct access to much of Flock’s system and does not have to ask local police to run searches. It also shows that CBP had access to at least one other police department system in Colorado, in this case Boulder, which is a state whose laws forbid sharing license plate reader data with the federal government for immigration enforcement. Boulder’s Flock settings also state that it is not supposed to be used for immigration enforcement.

This story and our earlier stories, including another about a Texas official who searched nationwide for a woman who self-administered an abortion, were reported using Flock “Network Audits” released by police departments who have bought Flock cameras and have access to Flock’s network. They are essentially a huge spreadsheet of every time that the department’s camera data was searched; it shows which officer searched the data, what law enforcement department ran the search, the number of networks and cameras included in the search, the time and date of the search, the license plate, and a “reason” for the search. These audit logs allow us to see who has access to Flock’s systems, how wide their access is, how often they are searching the system, and what they are searching for.

The audit logs show that whatever system Flock is using to enroll local police departments’ cameras into the network that CBP is searching does not have any meaningful pushback, because the data shows that CBP has access to as many or more cameras as any other police department. Freeman analyzed the searches done by CBP on June 13 compared to searches done by other police departments on that same day, and found that CBP had a higher number of average cameras searched than local police departments.

“The average number of organizations searched by any agency per query is 6,049, with a max of 7,090,” Freeman told 404 Media. “That average includes small numbers like statewide searches. When I filter by searches by Border Patrol for the same date, their average number of networks searched is 6,429, with a max of 6,438. The reason for the maximum being larger than the national network is likely because some agencies have access to more cameras than just the national network (in-state cameras). Despite this, we still see that the count of networks searched by Border Patrol outnumbers that of all agencies, so if it’s not the national network, then this ‘pilot program’ must have opted everyone in the nation in by default.”

CBP did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

A Texas Cop Searched License Plate Cameras Nationwide for a Woman Who Got an Abortion

The sheriff said the woman self-administered the abortion and her family were concerned for her safety, so authorities searched through Flock cameras.

^{Joseph Cox (404 Media)}

404 Media

2025-08-12 15:04:32

Feds Used Local Cop's Password to Do Immigration Surveillance With Flock Cameras

A Drug Enforcement Administration agent used a local police officer’s password to the Flock automated license plate reader system to search for someone suspected of an “immigration violation.” That DEA agent did this “without [the local police officer’s] knowledge,” and the password to the Flock account, which belonged to the Palos Heights PD, has since been changed. Using license plate readers for immigration enforcement is illegal in Illinois, and casual password sharing between local police and federal law enforcement for access to surveillance systems is, at the very least, against Flock’s terms of service.

The details of the search were first reported by the investigative news outlet Unraveled, which obtained group chats about the search using a public records request. More details about the search were obtained and shared with 404 Media by Shawn, a 404 Media reader who filed a public records request with Palos Heights after attending one of our FOIA Forums.

DEA agent used Illinois cop’s Flock license plate reader password for immigration enforcement searches
A federal Drug Enforcement Administration agent on a Chicago area task force used Palos Heights Detective Todd Hutchinson’s login credentials to perform unauthorized searches this past January. Group chat screenshots obtained via public records request show the detective and the feds discussing the incident.
Unraveled Press

Flock makes automated license plate reader (ALPR) cameras, which passively collect the time, plates, and model of cars that drive past them and enter them into a network that can then be searched by police. Our investigation in May showed that federal agents were gaining side-door access into this system by asking local police to perform immigration enforcement searches for them; the new documents show that in some cases, local police have simply given federal agents their passwords.

The documents obtained by Unraveled show details of an internal investigation done by the Palos Heights, Illinois police department in response to a series of questions that I asked them for an article we published in May that appeared to show a Todd Hutchinson, a police officer in Palos Heights, performing a series of Flock searches in January as part of their research into an “immigration violation.”

At the time, Palos Heights police chief Mike Yott told me that Hutchinson was a member of a DEA task force “that does not work immigration cases.”

“None of our officers that work with federal agencies have cross designation as immigration officers, and therefore have no immigration authority, and we and our partner agencies are very sensitive to the fact that we and the State of Illinois do not pursue immigration issues,” Yott said. “Based on the limited information on the report, the coding/wording may be poor and the use of Flock may be part of a narcotics investigation or a fugitive status warrant, which does on occasion involve people with various immigration statuses.”

Our reporting set off an internal investigation into what these searches were for, and who did them, according to the documents obtained by Unraveled. According to a July 9 investigation report written by the Palos Heights Police Department, Hutchinson was the only task force member who had access to Flock. Information about what the search was actually for is redacted in the internal investigation, and neither the Palos Heights Police Department nor the DEA has said what it was for.

“Hutchinson advised that it was common that he allowed others to use his login to Flock during the course of their drug investigations. TFO Hutchinson spoke to his group and learned that one of the DEA agents completed these searches and used his login information,” the report says. The DEA agent (whose name is redacted in the report) “did in fact use Hutchinson’s login for federal investigations in late January 2025 without Hutchinson’s knowledge of said use.”

“When I had shared my account with the Special Agent, I believed it would only be used for DEA/narcotics related investigations,” Hutchinson wrote in an email to his bosses explaining why he shared his password. Hutchinson said in a series of text messages to task force officers, which were also obtained by Unraveled, that he had to change the password to lock other members of the task force out of the system.

“What’s the new password?,” a task force member wrote to Hutchinson.

“Sorry man. Keys had to be taken away,” he responded.

The task force member replied with a gif of a sad Chandler Bing from friends sitting in the rain.

“Hey guys I no longer have access to Flock cause Hutch took my access away,” another group text reads. “Apparently someone who has access to his account may have been running plates and may have placed the search bar ‘immigration’.. which maybe have brought undue attention to his account. Effective immediately Defer all flock inquiries to Toss Hutchinstein[sic].”

“Dear Todd, I hope you don’t get in trouble cause of my mistake,” the DEA agent joked in the group chat. “U were so helpful in giving the group access but now that is gone, gone like dust,…..in the wind … Trust is broken / I don’t know if bridges can be mended … one day we might be back to normal but until then I will just have to sit by this window and pray things will return … Best Regards. Ps, can u flock a plate for me”

“Only time will tell my fate, I suppose,” Hutchinson responded. “What’s the plate? And confirming it is NOT for immigration purposes…”

“It was a test …… and u passed ….,” the DEA agent responds.

In response to a separate public records request filed by Shawn, the 404 Media reader, and shared with us, the Palos Heights Police Department said “Our investigation into this matter has revealed that while these inquiries appear to have been run as part of a taskforce assignment, no member of the Palos Heights Police Department ‘ran’ those queries. They were, apparently, run by another, non-Palos Heights, task force member who used a Palos Height's member's sign in and password information without his knowledge.”

The Palos Heights Police Department said in its investigation files that “this incident has brought to light the need to review our own protocols of LPR use.” The police department said that it had decided to limit searches of its Flock system only to agencies within the state of Illinois, rather than to police departments around the country. The department also turned on two-factor authentication, which had not been previously enabled.

“Lastly, I believe there is a need to start a monthly review of our own flock searches to ensure our officers are working within standards and compliant with all policies and laws,” the report says.

Palos Heights’ casual sharing of passwords to a powerful surveillance system is a violation of Flock’s terms of service, which states “Authorized End Users shall not share their account username or password information and must protect the security of the username and password.”

More concerningly, it shows, as we have been reporting, that there are very few practical guardrails on how Flock is being used. The DEA does not have a contract with Flock, and police generally do not obtain a warrant to use Flock. We have repeatedly reported on police officers around the country who have offered to either run plates for their colleagues or to give them access to their logins, even when those agencies have not gone through proper acquisition channels.

The Palos Heights police department did not respond to a request for comment from 404 Media. The DEA told 404 Media “we respectfully refer you to the Palos Heights Police Department.” Flock also did not respond to a request for comment. The House Oversight Committee announced last week that it had launched an investigation into how Flock is being used to search for immigration violations.

ICE Taps into Nationwide AI-Enabled Camera Network, Data Shows

Flock's automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras are in more than 5,000 communities around the U.S. Local police are doing lookups in the nationwide system for ICE.

^{Jason Koebler (404 Media)}