Guest Columnist Martin Hackworth: A Flock of Boneheads

Pocatello, ID, my town, is a small city in the Northern Rockies with some pressing issues. The economic fortunes of Pocatello have been swirling around the commode for most of this century. Most proposals from civic leaders and elected officials to fix what ails us might alter the direction of rotation but won’t stop the flush. Hard times.

Most of the large private sector employers who once provided jobs and a tax base in Pocatello are either leaving or gone. Union Pacific, Simplot and FMC—going, going and gone. AMI semiconductor—gone. Idaho State University, having been poorly run for decades, is on life support. And most recently, Amy’s Kitchen downsized to what’s required to keep the premises from being stripped for copper wire. There is no silver lining anywhere in this cloud.

All of this bounty of misery is, mind you, running against the drift of boom times for the state of Idaho, which is currently experiencing a population growth rate of 1.44%, second in the nation, and a GDP that’s growing at a current rate of 1.5%. Turning this cornucopia of good fortune into a screwupathon is quintessential Pocatello, where the government, from the mayor all the way down to cafeteria lunch ladies, consists of not-ready-for-prime-time players.

About the only things growing around here are gangs, illegal drugs, untreated mental illness, and a homeless population.

Oh, and Flock cameras, which are a solution to almost none of our problems. The City of Pocatello quietly installed a dozen or so about a year ago and most people around here were less than thrilled once this became known. I literally don’t know anyone in Pocatello, outside of city hall, who approves of Flock cameras. And for good reason.

Flock Safety, an Atlanta-based company valued at $8 billion, is known for their nationwide network of AI-powered automated license plate readers (ALPRs)—aka Flock cameras—that capture images of passing vehicles and store them in a database searchable by any Flock customer. This arrangement has caused alarm due to lack of accountability over frequent instances of inappropriate use and general privacy concerns.

Physically, Flock cameras are compact, black, pole-mounted, and solar-powered devices generally placed near intersections, neighborhood entrances, and parking lots. These devices photograph the rear of passing vehicles, logging the license plate number, make, model, color, and specific features such as bicycle racks or body damage, along with the time and location, and then upload this data to a cloud-based network that allows agencies across different jurisdictions to search the database with few restrictions.

While Flock Safety insists that its cameras identify vehicles rather than individuals, AI-powered search features accessible to Flock users allow queries that focus on individuals rather than vehicles. This has been verified in both reporting and to me personally by friends in law enforcement who use Flock.

Once you get past their aggressive sales pitch and the sunshine and rainbows gack on Flock’s website about benevolently locating missing children, it turns out that Flock Safety is a behemoth dedicated to AI-powered warrantless surveillance of Americans in public—with a twist that, though loathsome, is marketing genius. We’ll get to that presently.

Many communities or institutions that have signed up with Flock in the interests of public safety (who doesn’t want the public to be safe?) are having second thoughts after revelations of abuse and closer inspection of the contracts they signed. Those communities and institutions are the smart ones. Several within a few hundred miles of here are abandoning Flock and going to standalone systems that don’t raise as many privacy concerns.

But in many instances, that’s easier said than done.

Elgin Community College, located just west of Chicago, signed a one-year contract with Flock Safety in April 2025 to install six cameras on their campus. This was part of a greater movement that saw universities all over the Chicago area installing Flock cameras to enhance public safety. If you know very much about Chicago, you can understand how any port looks good in a storm.

But the Elgin administration almost immediately became concerned when it realized how widely others could search its camera images—specifically ICE. With a large undocumented student population, Elgin subsequently sought to end its contract with Flock and requested that the company remove the cameras.

This just might be the one instance in which I agree with a woke college administration about anything, although not for exactly the same reasons.

Within a day, Flock rejected the request because, as they informed Elgin, they were complying with their end of the contract. Elgin then offered to pay the rest of the contract without the cameras. Flock did not respond and subsequently ceased communicating with Elgin.

Because Elgin did not want the cameras used, and Flock would not remove them or even answer email, Elgin staff covered the cameras with zip-tied garbage bags. A day or so later, someone removed the garbage bags. A cat-and-mouse game ensued in which people arriving in unmarked vehicles would remove the garbage bags, after which staff at Elgin would cover them again. This continued until the contract expired this past April and the cameras were finally removed.

The problem with Flock is that places like Elgin (and Pocatello) don’t read the fine print well enough to understand what they are getting themselves into. Flock’s sales team bumrushes clients into signing up for the good of public safety (again, who doesn’t want that?), while glossing over or ignoring privacy concerns and the implications of misuse. If the reporting I’ve seen on Flock contracts is accurate, no city should ever sign one.

In places like Pocatello (or in most college administrations), good luck finding anyone with enough sense to figure out what Flock is up to until it’s too late.

Therein lies the twist. You can forget about signing a contract with Flock that adequately addresses privacy concerns or objections to misuse. You are not going to rewrite a Flock contract to restrict what you don’t like or want because their entire business model is based on the fact that you are not their customer as much as you are their product. Flock is selling your data to the entire country without your control. That’s where the money is for them

I am not a soft-on-crime kind of guy. I generally support and am grateful for robust law enforcement concerning serious crime. I’m all for exporting those who are in this country illegally, en masse. And I’m willing to give law enforcement the benefit of the doubt in most close calls, as long as they stay within certain boundaries.

But mass warrantless surveillance is not a close call, and it is way outside the lines. Before 9/11 and the subsequent enactment of the Patriot Act (which Congress used to betray their law-abiding constituents by stripping them of rights), a system of public surveillance accessible without a warrant by nearly anyone with an LE credential, for any purpose, would have been unthinkable. My how far we’ve fallen in just a quarter of a century.

Look at how well this has worked out in Great Britain, where warrantless public surveillance is a fact of modern life. In Great Britain, the police know exactly how to track you down for saying mean things about the government on the Internet—like how you disapprove of how they protect men in immigrant grooming gangs who sexually abuse children—but won’t arrest the abusers themselves. How’s that working out for them?

Associated Press and Idaho Press Club-winning columnist Martin Hackworth of Pocatello is a physicist, writer, climber, skier, motorcyclist, musician, and retired Idaho State University faculty member who now spends his time raising four kids. Follow him on X at @MartinHackworth, on Facebook at facebook.com/martin.hackworth, and on Substack at martinhackworthsubstack.com.