Howdy and welcome to your Thursday FOIAball.
You probably opened this expecting to read about our ever-encroaching surveillance state. And you will. But first, I wanna go back to Pitbull.
If you hit the paywall yesterday and thought, darn, I wish I could have read that, now you can! The piece got some traction on social media, so I pulled the paywall down. Pitbull’s misdeeds must be known to the world.
Of course, taking that down means one less opportunity to convince readers to upgrade to a paid subscription. As such, you are hereby ordered to not gloss over the next sentence!
Upgrade to a paid subscription.
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Thank you for your attention to this matter. Now onward. To our digital dystopia
Flock cameras are in colleges across the country
As you’ve probably discerned by now, FOIAball isn’t exactly a standard sports site. We are not terribly interested in on-field questions like who is good, who is bad, and what is quarterback.
I like those things, but a lot of people do that work way better. I personally find the world around college sports much more fascinating.
And because public universities and their athletics departments interface with so many elements of our society, they are wonderful at illuminating what is really happening in this country.
This preamble is to say today’s post is mostly not about football or sports. Flock cameras have exploded in use over the past few years, with some 5,000 law enforcement agencies across the country signing contracts to help build a digital panopticon.
That’s not hyperbole; Flock is creating a world where authorities can locate anyone, anywhere, with extremely dubious permissions. Paid for by your tax dollars. It sucks. imo. And its services are being utilized at places that should be free from the long arm of the surveillance state.
Flock is signing contracts with campus police departments across the country. At a time when college students have seen their First Amendment rights grossly infringed upon, FOIAball thought you should know which schools use them.
Okay. Fine. You want a sports angle? The firm is expanding from the license plate reader market into live people surveillance. Flock is selling mobile trailers for universities to set up outside stadiums during big games.
We found a school that got one.
Unfortunately, this post is going to be pretty listicle-y, so let’s try to have some fun up front. By flagging places that thought their contracts with Flock would never show up in the news. Like private universities.
Private schools aren’t subject to public records laws. Their campus police departments exist in a grey area. Some are exempt from records laws, others are granted very broad exemptions.
In Indiana, private university campus police are only required to release records regarding staffing and arrests.
So Notre Dame wouldn’t have to tell us if its campus police uses Flock cameras. But they do.
How do we know? Thanks to a public records quirk that reveals Flock’s massive reach, and which some states are trying to close in the name of greater secrecy. Flock publishes audit logs that allow departments to see what agencies have searched networks that contain their cameras.
You see, Flock highlights in contracts that its clients can “leverage a nationwide system boasting 10 billion additional plate reads per month.”
That’s language you won’t see on its own site, because it reveals how invasive the system is. But it shows up in materials provided to places it works with.
It’s a huge network tied together by lots of individual nodes. And when an agency searches a network your cameras are part of, you get a notification.
Audit logs for neighboring Ball State in Indiana show that the Fighting Irish PD conducted 74 searches on networks associated with Ball State in January 2026. Flock says you can’t search Flock if you aren’t a Flock client, so… you tell me.
That doesn’t mean Notre Dame was looking specifically at Ball State’s campus cameras. It conducted a search that looked across over 400 networks, of which Ball State was a part of. That range is rather restrained. A lot of searches are conducted on the whole system, which encompasses nearly 6,000 nodes.
Other private schools we couldn’t FOIA but found in audit logs obtained from Ball State, UNC-Charlotte, and New Mexico State include Rice and Houston Christian in Texas, Elon in North Carolina, Emory in Georgia, and even an Ivy League school. Congrats to Cornell.
That isn’t the only hurdle in figuring this out. Florida is known for having great Sunshine Laws. But the state is hyperprotective of certain records. The University of South Florida denied our request for contracts under an exemption that shields police “surveillance techniques or procedures.”
But in our audit log from two states over, well, you can guess who showed up. In January, USF police conducted 24 searches that touched on networks UNCC is part of. Also on the list was Florida State. (Go ‘Noles!)
This piece isn’t about Florida, but since they restrict that data, and FOIAball doesn’t like that, we’ll note we found over 150 agencies in the state that use Flock.
Pennsylvania also has restrictions on what data you can obtain from universities, so you couldn’t ask Temple if Temple uses Flock. But…
Other schools we discerned use Flock through logs and not specific records requests include Alabama, Memphis, Tennessee, Illinois (both its Chicago and Urbana-Champaign campuses), Clemson, Ohio State, George Mason, and Virginia Tech.
Let’s talk about the contracts FOIAball obtained. Alphabetically, we have deals with: Akron, Appalachian State, Arizona, Ball State, Colorado at Boulder, Georgia Southern, Iowa, Iowa State, Louisiana Lafayette, Louisville, Minnesota, New Mexico State, ODU, San Jose State, Toledo, UNC, UNC Charlotte, and Western Michigan.
The contracts range in time frame, scope, and cost. Schools are typically spending between $15,000 to $50,000 a year for installation costs and access to Flock’s operating system.
It adds up. A deal Arizona signed is for five years and $800,000. UNC hopped on board for three years at $220,000. It’s reasonable to assume Flock’s income from just public universities alone is well over eight figures a year.
I realize I haven’t fully explained Flock. If you are down here, you probably already know about it, but its capabilities are downright jarring. It uses solar-powered cameras, which can be installed anywhere, to grab the license plates of every single car that drives by. That can then be used by police to see where, well, anyone went.
Flock says its nationwide search feature was built only for serious crimes, like kidnapping and drug trafficking. But audit logs show local police departments are doing nationwide searches for petty larcenies and fender-benders. Flock could stop that behavior tomorrow, if it wanted to.
For schools, Flock hypes its ability to build lists of suspicious individuals, so campus police can get a real-time alert if a flagged plate shows up. It boasts of being able to create a virtual gate around your university, you know, those bastions of free expression built on public infrastructure.
All told, FOIAball identified over 75 colleges and universities that have some relationship with Flock. The number is almost assuredly much higher. Here’s the link. I didn’t upload all the files and audit logs, but if you would like to see them, they’re public records. Reach out to [email protected], and I will gladly share.
Now, Flock is moving past license plate readers, using cameras to track people. It is selling mobile units that can be installed anywhere, which Flock is explicitly marketing as a way to keep sporting events safe.
We found that Iowa State purchased one at a cost of $43,500 over two years.
If you want to really learn how bad the firm is, check out the horror stories over at 404 Media. Regardless of your politics, it is a truly disturbing surveillance system that has been foisted upon us without our consent. The public deserves to know every single detail about.
And look, I haven’t even touched on immigration enforcement yet. Flock says it does not share data with ICE. But is a very random state agency that’s been deputized to work on behalf of the department using Flock to conduct immigration searches?
We’ll just say there might be a story about that coming out soon.
Would you like for me to continue to reveal stories that our entitled tech overloads squirm? The only way to absolutely guarantee that is by becoming a paid subscriber to FOIAball.
