The company Flock Safety has suspended its collaboration with federal agencies

• Flock Safety has suspended its collaboration with federal agencies due to violations regarding data usage.
• The Illinois law prohibits the transfer of data about license plates in cases related to abductions.
• The company has changed its system for clear marking of federal requests.

SPRINGFIELD, Illinois — One of the leading operators of automatic license plate reading systems, Flock Safety, announced the suspension of its operations with federal agencies due to noncompliance and violations that arose in Illinois.

Flock Safety, whose cameras are installed in over 4,000 communities across the country, recently suspended pilot programs with Customs and Border Protection (CBP) and its law enforcement division, Homeland Security Investigations (HSI). The statement about this was made by the founder and CEO of the company, Aarret Langley.

Officials, including Illinois Secretary of State Alex Jananulis, expressed their concern about the violations. He reported that an audit revealed CBP's access to data from Illinois, although it is unclear whether this access is related to immigration information. The law, adopted in 2023, prohibits the transfer of license plate data to police investigating cases of abductions or undocumented immigrants.

Langley noted that the company initiated pilot programs to combat human trafficking and fentanyl distribution. He emphasized that the parameters of the requests were unclear, and the company does not know about any searches related to immigration.

After the incident in June, when police forwarded data to a sheriff in Texas, who was searching for a missing woman, Jananulis demanded greater accountability from Flock Safety regarding abductions. The company has changed its system to clearly identify federal requests and prohibited general national searches.

According to a representative of Flock Safety, new terms for blocking requests related to terms such as "abduction" and "immigration" are in effect since June.

Tags: USA/Technology