New California Report, Old Flock Shenanigans

Another California post. Flock CEO Garett Langley is grateful to “live in a beautifully, democratic, capitalistic country where we [can] fight in court.” So am I — I express my gratitude by throwing Flock’s own logs onto the burning dumpster fire ignited by not one but two active class action lawsuits against Langley’s company.^[1]

First, a new report: California Out-of-State Queries.

A note on what’s here and what isn’t: some older California-specific reports were removed after suspected changes on Flock’s end began producing incorrect results. This report replaces them with a narrower, more defensible dataset.

This report contains all external searches seen by California agencies for which we have log files (which isn’t many, but if you have some, or you want to go file some requests, send them to humans@haveibeenflocked.com!).

The ~14.5M out of state searches currently documented in the report come from the four agencies listed above. Other agencies which contributed data that showed no out of state searches were the California Highway Patrol (for the period 2024-11-25 — 2025-12-01) and Buena Park, CA PD (for the period 2026-01-19 — 2026-02-23).

The point of the report is that it shows searches of cameras placed in California, that have collected data about Californians; it will tell you if a query from a non-California agency “hit” a California agency.

The report’s “source agency” column will tell you which agency reported the search. And, yes, every single one of these 14.5M+ searches may violate California’s prohibition on sharing ALPR information with agencies outside the state (SB34).^[2]

February 11, 2025, is the date was reported to have disabled all out-of-state access for non-California agencies. For Santa Cruz and Capitola, the only non-California agency appearing in the logs after that data is Blue Lake Rancheria Tribal PD. El Cajon is being sued by the AG.

Seaside strangely reported only a handful of searches. On inspection:

We have very limited logs for Seaside (approx. 2025-01-20 — 2025-02-17), so it’s possible that far more searches of Seaside by non-California agencies have occurred outside that limited visible window.

Nothing confirms “Deactivated Users” is not a California agency, but OCDETF (Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Forces) was an independent federal agency under the US Department of Justice, recently dissolved and rehomed under the Department of Homeland Security.

Whatever federal access OCDETF had to California ALPR data through Flock now presumably belongs to DHS. Whether “Deactivated Users” represents side-door access that Flock obscured by omitting the agency name, or straightforward federal access, the result is the same: Californians’ data ended up with the federal government through Seaside PD and Flock.

And, of course, New Mexico is definitely not in California — there’s a whole Arizona in between.

Another thing that stands out about these searches is that they both covered about 300 networks (316 for the NM search, 335–336 for the OCDETF ones), suggesting 1:1 sharing agreements.

That certainly seems like a possibility, because according to its transparency portal, Seaside CA PD currently grants access to the following non-California agencies:

• Goshen Village NY PD
• Blue Lake Rancheria Tribal PD
• CA Iipay Nation of Santa Ysabel
• Decommissioned Org / Demo

The only 7 documented searches from Goshen, NY (pop. 5,777) happened between 11/12/2022 and 4/1/2023.

The likeliest explanation: Seaside granted access to what it believed to be Orange County, California, but ended up sharing California data with Orange County New York’s county seat: Goshen.

In case you’re curious, these are the states that most searched California records: