A Texas city has demanded $2.3 million to fulfill a public records request about Flock, the AI-powered license plate camera system used by police. Officials in North Richland Hills, a Fort Worth suburb, justified the fee by claiming that searching roughly a terabyte of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness would take about 14 years of labor at $15 per hour. Phil Mynona, who filed the request for the Texas Privacy Coalition, called the fee "ludicrous" and said it seemed designed to stifle his searches.
Mynona has filed similar requests with more than 200 law enforcement agencies and found no consistent pricing. Some agencies provided over 400,000 pages for free, while others charged $5,000. A Houston news station, KPRC, was quoted up to $121,000. The high fees come as anti-surveillance advocates point to documented abuses: an ex-Texas cop recently pleaded guilty to 100 felony counts of misuse of official information after Flock data was used to stalk people, and Texas Governor Greg Abbott halted Flock funding and stopped issuing permits in response.
Courts are beginning to question Flock's legality. A federal judge in Oklahoma ruled last week that a warrantless Flock search was unconstitutional, describing the network as "indiscriminate mass surveillance." The ruling does not set precedent, and Flock expects it to be overturned on appeal, but it is one of the first to recognize that such searches may violate the Fourth Amendment. Meanwhile, transparency remains scarce: of the hundreds of Texas agencies using Flock, only 59 have adopted optional transparency portals, and just 16 share data with the public.