Have I Been Flocked? A New Tool Lets Drivers Search Whether Their Licence Plate Appears in Flock Safety’s Surveillance Records

A Transparency Tool Emerges From the Surveillance Backlash

An independent editorial project called Have I Been Flocked? has launched a publicly accessible website that allows drivers to search whether their vehicle’s licence plate number appears in audit logs released from Flock Safety’s automated licence plate reader network — a system that has drawn mounting scrutiny from civil liberties advocates, local governments, and investigative journalists across the United States. As of 17 August, the site had compiled nearly 242 million searches involving more than 4.6 million unique plates, drawing on transparency portals and public records requests directed at local government agencies. The launch arrives at a moment of intensifying public debate over the reach of Flock’s infrastructure, which now spans police departments, private businesses, schools, and homeowners associations.

The context surrounding Flock Safety is not merely abstract. A recent Washington Post investigation identified at least 50 law enforcement officers who had been charged with or accused of misusing licence plate reader systems — in several cases to surveil women without their knowledge or consent. Separately, records reviewed by 404 Media documented more than 4,000 Flock searches conducted by local and state police at the request of federal officials, as informal favours, or for purposes potentially linked to immigration enforcement. Flock maintains that ICE cannot directly access its system, but the disclosed records illustrate how federal objectives can be pursued through local intermediaries — a structural arrangement that sits at the heart of contemporary concerns about networked surveillance.

How the Search Tool Works

The mechanics of the lookup are straightforward. Visitors to HaveIBeenFlocked.com enter a licence plate number into a search field; if that plate appears in the site’s compiled database, the results may display when the query was conducted, which agency initiated it, the name of the operator who ran the search, and the stated reason for the lookup. Some fields may be incomplete or redacted, depending on what the originating agency disclosed. The website is operated by Footnote4a, an independent editorial project focused on mass surveillance and government contracting, and its records are sourced entirely from Flock audit logs — documents that capture user activity within Flock’s system and that some local governments have released proactively or under public records obligations.

It is worth understanding precisely what those audit logs contain. According to the site’s own FAQ, the licence plate number and the stated reason for a search are details that a Flock operator entered manually at the time of the query. The logs therefore reflect what a user claimed they were doing, not an independently verified account of events. The site does not reveal whether the search returned a positive match within Flock’s internal database, nor does it show what the operator ultimately viewed or acted upon.

What a Match Does — and Does Not — Indicate

Finding one’s plate in the database carries a specific and limited meaning: a Flock user queried the system for that number at some point captured in the released records. It does not establish that the vehicle was stopped, that the driver was suspected of a crime, or that any formal investigation was opened. The operator who conducted the search may have been a police officer, but equally may have been an employee of a private business, a school administrator, or a member of a homeowners association — all of whom are among Flock’s documented client base. The stated reason attached to a result, whether referencing a stolen vehicle, a traffic stop, a missing person, or another matter, provides contextual information but should be read with the understanding that users supply those explanations themselves, without independent verification built into the system.

The Limits of an Incomplete Database

A search that returns no result does not constitute evidence that a plate has never been queried. The project’s database is built from records that individual government agencies have chosen to release or have been compelled to disclose through public records processes, and coverage remains uneven — relatively few agencies make their complete Flock audit logs readily accessible, and those that do often release documents that are heavily redacted or temporally limited. The site itself notes that there can be a significant delay, potentially spanning months or even years, between when a search occurs and when it surfaces in the database.

Operator identification presents a further complication. Flock’s audit logs frequently abbreviate an operator’s name to a first initial and the first three letters of a surname — rendering a name such as Kevin Zachary as “K. Zac,” an example the site itself provides. Have I Been Flocked? attempts to resolve these partial identifiers by cross-referencing them against public police rosters and employment records, but the site is explicit that such identifications are probabilistic and should be independently verified before any conclusion is drawn.

What Concerned Users Can Do

For drivers who discover a search that raises questions, the project recommends filing a formal public records request with the agency associated with the query, which may yield more complete documentation than what the site itself can provide. Anyone who believes they may have been subjected to improper or unlawful surveillance is advised to consult a lawyer. Beyond the plate lookup, the website also allows visitors to browse searches by agency and to explore curated reports touching on immigration enforcement activity, searches involving First Amendment-protected conduct, queries related to low-level or noncriminal matters, and searches that operators described as efforts to “develop probable cause” — a category that raises its own questions about the appropriate use of passive surveillance infrastructure. The tool does not resolve the deeper structural questions that Flock’s network poses, but it makes a portion of that network’s activity legible to the public for the first time.