Findings, signals, and open questions from active investigations.
The city's own Flock Safety audit logs show outside agencies searched St. Louis Park's license plate cameras for immigration enforcement 2,637 times, and once for a woman who “had an abortion.” A look at how default sharing settings turned one suburb's cameras into a national dragnet.
Police Data Pipelines
Elk Grove, California has sent LexisNexis 1.25 million local police records, from 911 call data to police reports themselves. Data from the Elk Grove Police Department shows that over a million local records have been…
Police Data Pipelines
California limits how local police help federal immigration enforcement. The Accurint Virtual Crime Center is a commercial database that California police agencies feed, and that ICE pays to search. Here is how those…
Surveillance Vendors
An Israeli company coached Indonesian government staff on how to find gay men on Facebook. A CyberGlobes analyst told them to search the local slang for gay, find outspoken activists, open their profiles, and pull the…
Police Data Pipelines
The CEO of LexisNexis Government Risk Solutions sent a notice to police departments across the country on July 1 asking them to contact LexisNexis before responding to public records requests. They warn about the…
Police Data Pipelines
Dearborn Police Department shares all 1,405 categories of report it generates with LexisNexis, with nothing held back, according to a data classification sheet the department produced in response to a public records…
Surveillance Vendors
General Dynamics Information Technology issued a $5.6 million subcontract to REDLattice on July 15, according to a SAM.gov subaward record surfaced by Jack Poulson. REDLattice is the Chantilly, Virginia offensive cyber…
News
The Minneapolis Police Department is buying mobile license plate readers, the kind mounted on squad cars, and paying for them with forfeiture money. An internal MPD email from a commander in the Administrative Services…
Police Data Pipelines
On May 11, 2026, a public records request landed in the inbox of the Maplewood Police Department, a St. Paul suburb of about 42,000 people. The requester, researching on behalf of FinePrint, wanted to know how the…
Surveillance Vendors
FinFisher was the Munich company that sold the FinSpy trojan to governments for over a decade. Citizen Lab caught it targeting Bahraini activists in 2012 and mapped its command servers in as many as 36 countries. German…
News
Minnesota Statute 13.824 requires every police department running an automated license plate reader to arrange an independent audit every two years. The results go to the commissioner of administration and the…
Police Data Pipelines
LexisNexis emails the Federal Way Police Department a receipt every morning confirming that another day of local police reports has been copied into its private national database. The July 9, 2026 report logged 385…
News
Minnesota law requires an independent audit of every police license plate reader program every two years. The audit exists to create a public record: results go to the Commissioner of Administration and the Legislative…
News
Two searches of St. Louis Park Police Department's Flock Safety cameras, run in October 2025 by the North Missouri Drug Task Force through Brookfield MO PD, each reached 25,263 networks. A normal nationwide lookup at…
Police Data Pipelines
Call Apple Valley police to report a crash, a stolen bike, or a relative in a mental health crisis, and your information is copied into a private database that law enforcement agencies across the country can search,…
Surveillance Vendors
Flock told its law enforcement customers in March that agencies sharing data federally "may receive a data sharing request from the FBI in the coming days," then followed up a week later with a ready-made Q&A for city…
Police Data Pipelines
The 2024 case, which has not previously been reported, shows ICE using LexisNexis to circumvent the Illinois TRUST act, preventing access to local law enforcement records. On September 16, 2024, Belleville, Illinois…
Public Records
When Capitola PD received a records request about its Flock cameras, Flock sent the department a guide on exemptions, redactions, and fees, then put its legal and external affairs staff on a call with the city the next…
Surveillance Vendors
On August 5, 2026, an Assistant Deputy Director at the Northern California Regional Intelligence Center (NCRIC) emailed PenLink asking about a trial of Webloc, the company's ad-based mass location tracking tool. The…
Police Data Pipelines
San Luis Obispo Police Department signed an agreement in 2019 committing its records to a national LexisNexis database that federal agencies can access. We obtained the signed agreement through a public records request.…
Public Records
Capitola's police chief negotiated a signed amendment barring Flock Safety from disclosing city data or changing the camera system without her permission, and told the company to expect more amendments at renewal.…
Surveillance Vendors
At least 25 California law enforcement agencies, from Imperial County on the Mexico border to San Bernardino County, asked to search a ten-camera beach town's Flock network in ten weeks. Capitola was sharing with five.…
News
An April 2026 email from a Flock Safety representative to Oshkosh, Wisconsin police leadership lays out three separate vehicle counts. The public sees the smallest one.
Police Data Pipelines
The University of Texas at Austin signed its police department up to contribute records to the LexisNexis Public Safety Data Exchange, making UTPD the first university police force confirmed as a contributor to the…
Surveillance Vendors
Flock Safety's Transparency Portal is the company's public accountability showcase. It is a page where a police department publishes live figures on how it uses its license plate readers, including a search audit that…
News
City payment records released through MuckRock show a $1,228,000 purchase of Flock's drone-as-first-responder hardware and software. San Francisco's surveillance technology inventory does not list it.
Police Data Pipelines
A Defense Department counterintelligence unit bought LexisNexis Accurint to screen its own workforce, and required the vendor to make employees' family members searchable. The Defense Threat Reduction Agency awarded…
Police Data Pipelines
Miami Township Police Department in Montgomery County, Ohio agreed to feed its records into LexisNexis's national law enforcement database, and in the same contract declined to share anonymized crime data and crime maps…
Police Data Pipelines
A six-page LexisNexis setup guide lays out the plumbing behind the Public Safety Data Exchange — and states plainly that the company prefers raw, unfiltered access to a department's entire records system over a curated slice of it.
Police Data Pipelines
A Colorado consortium's master contract bars LexisNexis from making service access conditional on data contribution, and it requires an agency's written consent before any of its records enter the national PSDEX pool.…
Police Data Pipelines
A LexisNexis administrator manual shows the public Community Crime Map and the Accurint Virtual Crime Center run on a single shared data layer, classified through one console at accurint.com. The Data Classification…
Police Data Pipelines
A February 2023 City of Austin council item authorized a five-year cooperative contract with LexisNexis Risk Solutions, up to $1.8 million, for the Accurint Virtual Crime Center. The contract was bought through the…
Police Data Pipelines
Oregon law limits how local police can assist federal immigration enforcement. The contract the Portland Police Bureau signed routes its records into a national LexisNexis database that federal agencies can search anyway — under a license the bureau cannot take back.
Police Data Pipelines
A 2021 expert report filed in federal court in the Southern District of Florida shows a private sector forensic accountant using LexisNexis Accurint for Law Enforcement as a primary research database — in a civil asset…
Police Data Pipelines
A city council memo from Oklahoma City, dated April 21, 2026, reveals that the police department negotiated a specific amendment to its LexisNexis AVCC contract restricting access to contributed data to authorized…
Police Data Pipelines
The Clear Creek County Sheriff's Office joined the Colorado Information Sharing Consortium in 2024, signing a standard LexisNexis addendum that commits the agency's records to the CISC Data Warehouse — which the…
Police Data Pipelines
Arvada PD's Policy 460 (effective June 11, 2025) states in its data retention section that mobile ALPR data "is also retained by LexisNexis Risk Solutions, per agreement with the Arvada Police Department." The…
Police Data Pipelines
In response to a public records request, the Downers Grove Police Department in Illinois confirmed that it actively contributes police records data to LexisNexis AVCC — and acknowledged it has no way to monitor what…
Surveillance Vendors
DHS told NPR five days ago that ICE has "no relationship" with Paragon Solutions or "the company that acquired them." The contract closed January 20. The "company that acquired them" is REDLattice - a Virginia cyber…
Police Data Pipelines
CISC states: 'Sharing beyond the consortium occurs only if and to the extent the contributing agency affirmatively authorizes that sharing. Agencies may tailor, limit, or revoke those permissions.' This directly…
Police Data Pipelines
CISC confirmed in writing: 'CISC has a master agreement with LexisNexis. Member agencies that elect to participate do so by executing a joinder (referred to as an addendum and joinder). By executing that document, a…
Police Data Pipelines
CISC's May 2026 CORA response (Robert Nanney, Executive Director) explicitly states: 'That data is stored in the CISC Regional Data Warehouse (a PSDEX private container maintained by LexisNexis).' This is the first time…
Police Data Pipelines
CISC confirmed it will provide all board meeting minutes responsive to the CORA request, and some are posted on cisc.colorado.gov. These minutes may contain: governance discussions about federal access or the ICE…
Police Data Pipelines
CISC states it does not possess ICDs, data-mapping guides, field-translation tables, or technical specs. LexisNexis redacted Schedule A pricing as confidential commercial information. Individual agencies say they are…
Surveillance Vendors
Lighthouse Reports' 2023 'Ghost in the Network' investigation documented that a Global Title operated by Fink Telecom Services attempted to locate the phone of Fredid Román, a Mexican journalist reporting on organized…
Police Data Pipelines
Initial review of CT state contracts suggests LPR data sharing occurs through a different channel than the standard AVCC/PSDEX pipeline. Needs deeper FOIA + contract analysis to confirm whether CT is contributing,…
Surveillance Vendors
Haaretz Dec 2022 investigation (based on internal Toka documents reviewed by a technical expert) confirmed Toka sells the ability to locate cameras within a perimeter, hack into them, monitor live feeds, and alter both…
Dispatch
FBI UCR data shows Alabama's ratio of law enforcement employees per 1,000 residents climbed sharply from roughly 3.5 in 2023 to approximately 4.4 in 2025 — the highest point in at least four decades of recorded data.…
Police Data Pipelines
Several cities that have declared themselves sanctuary jurisdictions still appear in PSDEX contributor lists via regional consortiums. Mechanism unclear — whether through state-level contracts that preempt local policy,…
Police Data Pipelines
Reviewing DHS BSIR grant language for FY2025 — several cities used grant funds explicitly for 'interoperable data sharing platforms compatible with national LPR networks.' This may represent a previously undocumented…
Surveillance Vendors
Added three additional entities linked to the NSO Group corporate structure: Q Cyber Technologies, OSY Technologies, and a newly identified Luxembourg holding company. Cross-referenced with Amnesty Tech and Citizen Lab…
News
New litigation challenges use of LexisNexis Accurint data — the same pipeline feeding PSDEX — in deportation enforcement. The suit argues the data sharing violates Fourth Amendment protections against warrantless…