Not long after Oak Park cut ties with its former license plate reader provider, an audit by the Illinois Secretary of State’s Office has found that the company broke state laws.
In June, Secretary of State Alexi Giannoulias announced that his office would be auditing the Illinois operations of Flock Safety, a large surveillance technology corporation that operates license plate reading cameras and other tech products in over 10,000 U.S. towns including Oak Park.
In the aftermath of the finding, Flock Safety has taken responsibility for poor communication and said it would do better in the future.
The state investigation found that the company had broken Illinois law by allowing data collected from license plate readers to be accessed by U.S. Customs and Border Protection agents.
Illinois has laws on the books banning license plate reader data from being used for immigration status investigations and criminal investigations related to out-of-state abortion access.
“As a result of the sample audit that included a sampling of 12 local law enforcement agencies, the office discovered late last week that Flock did not have proper safeguards in place for data sharing, which was compounded by the fact that the company was running a pilot program with U.S. Customs and Border Protection, which Flock leadership was unaware of,” Giannoulias’ office said in a statement this week. “This was uncovered as part of the Secretary of State’s audit, and Flock has also since paused its pilot with CBP and other federal agencies, not only in Illinois but nationwide.”
Earlier this week, Flock Safety CEO Garrett Langley wrote a blog post addressing the audit’s findings.
“We clearly communicated poorly. We also didn’t create distinct permissions and protocols in the Flock system to ensure local compliance for federal agency users,” he wrote. “In order to work with federal law enforcement agencies, while remaining committed to the values of the communities across the country we currently serve, we are engaging in a coordinated product, engineering, and policy effort to ensure that each of our client agencies better understand how to control their sharing relationships.”
The state’s audit comes weeks after Oak Park’s board of trustees voted on Aug. 5 to cancel the contract that the village had renewed with Flock Safety a year earlier. Trustees cited concerns over federal immigration enforcement agents’ potential access to Oak Park data, which would violate the village’s immigration sanctuary ordinance.
“This is what democracy looks like,” Trustee Brian Straw said. “So I do hope other communities will look at this conversation and will look at the national stories that are coming out and reconsider if they want to continue participating with Flock and continue sharing their data. This is a healthy part of democracy, to actually change what we’re doing in response to national events and trends.”
Oak Park had eight Flock Safety cameras in operation when the board voted to kill the contract, with all but one of the cameras situated within two blocks of the Oak Park-Chicago line.
The majority of Oak Park trustees voted to cancel the contract outright, but trustees Jim Taglia and Cory Wesly had introduced an alternative measure that would’ve shut off the cameras for 90 days as the Oak Park police worked on its own internal audit. Oak Park Village President Vicki Scaman said she wished the board would’ve taken that option to work through a more measured decision-making process that better included the expertise of the police department.
““While I know that all of you are very genuine about your service to our community, but this feels icky,” she said. “Nobody is going to watch this meeting and learn anything. We had the power as the village of Oak Park to have a more substantive conversation where we’re with our professional staff to uncover the challenges and to get down to facts and likely have come to the same place.”
Early work on that audit revealed that in January a Flock account associated with the south suburban Palos Heights Police Department had searched Oak Park Flock data 28 times with a stated purpose of investigation “immigration violation.”
Earlier this month, Chicago investigative journalism outlet Unraveled reported that a Palos Heights police detective had shared his login with a DEA agent last January. That agent, who served on a taskforce with the detective, then used the detective’s login to preform unauthorized searches of Flock’s Illinois database, using immigration violation as the stated purpose for the searches.
The outlet reportedly obtained text messages from a group chat with both the detective and the DEA agent via a FOIA request. According to Unraveled, after the detective wrote in the group chat that his Flock login had been changed as result of the immigration-related searches, the DEA agent sent a GIF of the sitcom character Chandler Bing sitting beside a window in the rain, writing “I hope you don’t get in trouble cause of my mistake. U were so helpful in giving the group access but now that is gone, gone like dust,……in the wind …”
Palos Heights Police Chief Mike Yott commented on the searches in a statement to Unraveled:
“We did look into the issue and found that our officer had violated our security practices and shared his Flock password with a federal law enforcement partner during an unrelated federal investigation,” Yott wrote in a statement to Unraveled. “The searches that were run were done so by that federal officer. Our officer has been disciplined due to the violation, passwords have been changed, and further security training was performed.”
Since the Secretary of State’s announcement on the investigation, another Chicago suburb has followed Oak Park’s lead by canceling their contracts with. Flock Safety. On Tuesday, Aug. 26, Evanston announced that it would shut off its 19 Flock license plate readers effective Sept 26.
