The Electronic Frontier Foundation published an analysis on September 15, 2026, of internal search logs from Flock Safety’s automated license plate reader network, the mass surveillance system used by thousands of police departments across the United States. Reporting by EFF researchers Rindala Alajaji and Dave Maass found officers in at least six states, including Ohio, Texas, Indiana, California, and Georgia, entering search justifications that amounted to jokes rather than legitimate law enforcement purposes. Logged reasons included “LOL,” “LMAO,” “idk,” strings of random keyboard characters, and outright insults, attached to searches that pulled a driver’s location history.

What the audit trail is supposed to do

ALPR systems like Flock Safety’s are marketed to police departments on the promise of accountability: every search is supposed to require a stated reason, creating a paper trail that lets the public and oversight bodies check whether officers are pulling data on someone’s whereabouts for an actual investigation rather than personal curiosity or harassment. EFF’s findings show that promise breaking down in practice. When an officer can log “lol” as a justification and face no consequence, the audit field stops functioning as oversight and becomes a formality nobody enforces.

This is not a hypothetical privacy concern. ALPR networks compile a rolling record of where a car, and by extension its owner, has been, often across jurisdictions and over months. A search log an officer can fill with a joke is a search nobody meaningfully reviewed before, during, or after. EFF is calling for two specific fixes: a warrant requirement before an officer can query a person’s location history through these networks, and strict data-deletion timelines so the record being casually searched does not sit indefinitely in the first place.

The pattern beyond one vendor

Flock Safety is not the first ALPR vendor to face this kind of scrutiny, and the underlying problem, weak or unenforced audit requirements, extends to other mass-surveillance tools police departments have adopted with limited public input. Facial recognition, cell-site simulators, and social-media monitoring software have each drawn similar findings in past years: a written-reason requirement means little without independent review or real penalties for abuse.

WikiActivism’s view

Civil-rights protections built around a paperwork requirement are only as strong as somebody’s willingness to actually read the paperwork. EFF’s review makes a case that few departments do, and that the fix is not more logging, but a legal gate, a warrant, in front of the search itself, rather than a reason typed in after the fact by the same person doing the searching. Until that changes, the existence of an audit trail should not be mistaken for the existence of oversight.

Source: EFF, “The High Crime of ‘LMAO’: How Cops Are Treating Mass Surveillance As a Joke”, September 15, 2026.