Woodburn, Oregon. Population 27,000. In late 2024, the city put up 24 Flock Safety license plate cameras. Officials said the data stays local — Woodburn PD and Oregon agencies only.
Then they audited themselves. That almost never happens. What they found is the whole story.
The Numbers
Between March and June 2025, DHS and Border Patrol searched Woodburn’s camera network 384 times.
Each of those searches hit approximately 6,000 Flock networks and 80,000 cameras at once. A query through Woodburn was a query through the entire country.
4,734 agencies. Departments from Florida, Michigan, Wisconsin — all querying plates captured in a town of 27,000 in Oregon’s Willamette Valley.
How It Works
Flock has a feature called National Lookup. Turn it on and your cameras become searchable by every agency in the network. Woodburn’s police department turned it on without understanding what it did. They disabled it in October 2025. By then, the damage was done.
This was not a hack. It was the system working as designed. Flock builds local cameras into a national surveillance grid. The city signed the contract. The feature shipped enabled. Federal agents used it.
Oregon Pushed Back
Eugene pauses Flock cameras after an ACLU lawsuit reveals 57 concealed camera locations.
Woodburn suspends cameras. Skamania County (WA) disables its six cameras.
Eugene and Springfield end Flock contracts. Talent, Oregon votes unanimously to pause, citing Sanctuary State laws.
Bend kills its Flock contract. Oregon lawmakers announce statewide ALPR regulation.
Senator Wyden wrote Flock’s CEO directly, calling camera abuse inevitable and saying the company has no interest in preventing it. He told local officials to pull the cameras entirely.
At least 30 communities nationwide have canceled Flock contracts since early 2025.
What This Actually Means
Every Flock camera is a node in a national network. Your plate gets captured, and thousands of agencies you have never heard of can query it for reasons you will never know. No opt-out form. No consent mechanism. No notification.
The only way to see what is around you is DeFlock.me — a crowdsourced project that has mapped over 76,000 plate readers across the country. Search your city. Check your commute. The results tend to be unsettling.
Woodburn promised the data stays local. It did not. Promises do not control data. Network architecture does. Flock’s architecture is built to share.
Oregon communities figured this out and acted. The question is whether yours will.
— J. Daniel, Dark Scrub