Source: 404 Media
Flock Safety, a surveillance company, fabricated an entire police department as a technical workaround to search live license plate reader footage. The fake department bypassed normal access controls and audit trails while receiving the same search privileges as real law enforcement. The gap between the governance structures surveillance companies claim to have and their actual practices is real: when proper oversight becomes inconvenient, companies redesign the infrastructure rather than constrain access itself. The incident shows how embedded automated surveillance has become in city infrastructure—embedded enough that a private company can invent fictional law enforcement to exploit it.