City officials unanimously approved a revocation of Flock Safety’s access to Syracuse streets, effectively ending that company’s tenure as the city’s license plate reader vendor.
The decision came after months of Central Current’s reporting on the Syracuse Police Department’s exposure of city driver’s sensitive data, which occurred through Flock Safety’s national network of thousands of law enforcement partner agencies. Through an inadvertent opt-in, SPD for nearly a year allowed outside entities to access the data it was collecting and storing on Syracuse drivers, defying explicit instructions from former Mayor Ben Walsh’s hand-picked policy experts.
That data wound up in the hands of federal immigration agents, some of whom requested local law enforcement agents to search Syracuse’s database on behalf of the federal agents, in what some experts called “back-door access” to Flock’s national network of databases. Flock Safety avows it has never had a formal partnership with the federal government. The company did grant Border Patrol agents covert access to its servers through a “pilot” agreement with U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Because the Syracuse Police Department had opted into Flock’s national network, the federal agents could access Syracuse’s data…