Konechne Letter: Flock cameras

May 14, 2026

Dear Mayor Niemeyer and members of the Brookings City Council,

My name is Dr. Andrew Konechne. I am a proud graduate of South Dakota State University and have practiced in clinical care for over a decade. I am thankful to call Brookings my home. I currently serve at Avera Brookings Medical Clinic, where I helped build and now lead the diabetes and anticoagulation clinics — the kind of care that depends on trust, and is made stronger when your practitioner is also the person you see at the grocery store and the sidelines.

Outside the clinic, I volunteer alongside parents in the hockey locker room, help organize swim- team fundraisers, assist in putting together figure skating club events, and attend public meetings because I care deeply about the kind of community we are building together.

I share all of this because I want you to understand who I am, and who I aim to be in said community — someone with a real stake in Brookings, just like all of you who graciously serve on this council. Building a clinical program from the ground up means I am no stranger to contracts, regulatory fine print, and the gap that can exist between what an agreement promises and what it actually delivers. I am writing because something has come to light that I believe requires all of our attention. The terms of our city’s agreement with Flock Safety have been fundamentally changed — not by us, but by Flock — in ways that directly contradict the terms and assurances Brookings relied on when this agreement was made.

I imagine that receiving letters about Flock Safety may feel exhausting by now, and I want to thank you for your time in addressing them. You may feel that residents raising these concerns are second-guessing your judgment, or that this issue has become needlessly political. You may worry that ending this contract could be seen as being soft on crime. I understand all of that, and I want you to know: none of those things are what I believe, and none of them are why I am writing.

The Original Promise

I believe every member of this Council welcomed Flock into our community in good faith. The original promise was straightforward, and it was made not just to this Council, but to every city

Flock entered. That promise rested on a clear set of commitments:

• The city owns the data. Flock’s older contracts stated explicitly: “As between Flock and Customer, all right, title and interest in the Customer Data, belong to and are retained solely by Customer.” Flock’s own marketing materials went further, telling communities: “Your neighborhood owns 100 percent of the data.” (Source: flocksafety.com/blog/privacy-and-access — still published as of this writing.)

• Flock will not sell your data. Prior contract language included an unambiguous promise: “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data.” The same assurance extended to anonymized data as well: “Flock does not own and shall not sell Anonymized Data.” (Source: Flock Safety standard EULA, publicly available via prior municipal contracts and archived at axon-com-files.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com. Flock confirmed the deletion of this language on its own blog, February 17, 2026.)

• Data retention is temporary. Flock committed to a 30-day default retention period, after which data would be automatically and permanently deleted. This was a central selling point: short retention, no long-term tracking. (Source: flocksafety.com/trust/data-privacy and flocksafety.com/legal/flock-evidence-policy.)

• Local agencies control access. Flock assured cities that local law enforcement would decide who could access data. Flock’s own privacy page stated: “Flock Safety will never share, sell, or access your data.” (Source: flocksafety.com/blog/privacy-and-access — still published as of this writing.)

• Flock’s license to use data was limited. Earlier contract versions granted Flock only a limited license to use customer data “as may be necessary for Flock to provide the

Flock Services to Customer.” That was it. Nothing perpetual, nothing irrevocable, nothing about improving Flock’s own products. (Source: Flock Safety standard EULA, same archived document referenced above.)

I want to draw particular attention to something as we move into the next section “What Changed.” Several of the promises listed above — including “Your neighborhood owns 100 percent of the data” and “Flock Safety will never share, sell, or access your data” — are still published on Flock’s website today, even as the contract language now says something entirely different. Flock has not merely changed the terms, as I will soon illustrate. It continues to actively advertise promises it has no intention of keeping. These are not outdated pages that slipped through the cracks. They are marketing tools designed to reassure the public while the fine print tells a different story.

Under those original conditions above, I supported the decision. Most of us did. That is precisely why I am writing now. The conditions that made that agreement acceptable no longer exist.

What Changed — and Why It Matters

On February 16, 2026, Flock Safety published updated Terms and Conditions. The changes were not cosmetic. Every one of the promises listed above has been weakened, removed, or reversed.

Flock’s updated Section 4.1, publicly available at flocksafety.com/legal/terms-and-conditions, now states that the customer: “…grants to Flock a limited, non-exclusive, royalty-free, irrevocable, perpetual, worldwide license to (a) use and disclose Customer Data to provide the Flock Services; and (b) use Customer Data to support and improve Flock’s products and services.”

At the same time, Flock removed the explicit promise that had appeared in prior contract versions. The sentence “Flock does not own and shall not sell Customer Data” no longer appears anywhere in Flock’s operative contract language.

Flock has acknowledged the removal on its own blog, stating: “We removed a sentence that previously stated ‘Flock shall not sell Customer Data’ because it was redundant, not because our position changed.” But a promise is only redundant if the same protection exists elsewhere in the agreement. I have read Flock’s current Terms and Conditions, dated February 16, 2026, in their entirety. The prohibition on selling customer data does not appear in Section 4, it does not appear in the confidentiality provisions, and it does not appear anywhere else in the operative contract. It is simply gone. The claim that this is a redundancy is not just inaccurate or a misinterpretation. It is a lie. There is no other way to describe this. The only protection our neighbors had against the sale of our data was that sentence, and Flock removed it while telling us nothing had changed.

Here is what changed, stated plainly:

• The data license went from limited to perpetual and irrevocable. It no longer expires when the contract ends.

• Flock can now use customer data to “support and improve Flock’s products and services.” This language is so broad it is functionally meaningless as a limitation.

Any use of our data can be framed as “improving” a product or service. There is no way to enforce this, no way to prove a violation, and no way to hold Flock accountable for what it does with our city’s data under this clause. That is not an accident. It is a blank check, written in legal language.

• The promise not to sell customer data was deleted. Flock calls this “redundant,” but no replacement language exists anywhere in the current contract.

• Disputes now go to mandatory arbitration under Georgia law — not South Dakota courts, not our laws. If Brookings ever needed to challenge Flock’s conduct, we would no longer do so in front of a South Dakota judge applying South Dakota law. We would be forced into arbitration on Flock’s home turf, under rules that favor the company that wrote them.

• Flock controls the terms on its own website and can change them at will — any new order form, even for a camera repair, can supersede the original agreement.

Flock has also requested that the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine exclude its website, making it impossible to even verify what the terms said when a city originally signed. This means that any future change Flock wishes to make in its own favor can be made without notification, without our consent, and without any obligation to honor past promises. Based on everything we have already seen, we should not merely suspect this will happen. We should expect it.

Read together, the pattern is unmistakable. Flock has not only rewritten the agreement however it wished — it has simultaneously moved our ability to do anything about it out of South Dakota and into its own backyard. This clearly illustrates Flock’s intent was never simply to help communities read license plates to stop crime and keep families safe. If it were, Flock would not need a perpetual license to our data. It would not need to delete its promise not to sell that data.

It would not need to force disputes into private arbitration a thousand miles from here. These are not the actions of a company focused on public safety. These are the actions of a company building a product out of our communities’ data — and these contract changes are designed to ensure we cannot stop them. Flock is testing what communities will tolerate. If we accept this, there will be more.

We Are Not Alone in This Concern

Brookings would not be acting in isolation. Across the country, more than forty cities and counties have now suspended, terminated, or declined to renew contracts with Flock Safety.

These include communities of every size and political orientation:

Mountain View, California: voted unanimously to terminate its contract after an internal audit revealed that the ATF, the Air Force, and the GSA Inspector General had all accessed the city’s surveillance data without authorization — through a nationwide search setting that Flock enabled without the city’s permission or knowledge (ABC7 San Francisco, February 2026; Peninsula Press, February 2026). Cambridge, Massachusetts: terminated its contract after Flock’s technicians installed two new cameras weeks after the City Council had unanimously ordered all Flock devices deactivated and removed. The city called it “a material breach of our trust and the agreement” (City of Cambridge official statement, December 2025; The Harvard Crimson, December 2025).

Santa Cruz voted 6-1 to terminate. Boston, Flagstaff, Olympia, Syracuse, Bend, Evanston, and many others have followed. Berkeley’s own Police Accountability Board identified nine provisions in the Flock contract requiring amendment before approval, including the perpetual data license. Even Dunwoody, Georgia — just miles from Flock’s headquarters — unanimously voted to defer its Flock contract pending legal review.

These are not radical communities chasing headlines. They are cities that looked carefully at the facts, concluded that Flock could not be trusted, and acted accordingly. The pattern is consistent: cities discover that the “local” system they were promised is part of a broader surveillance network with risks no local policy can fully contain.

This Is About Trust, Not Technology

I want to be clear about what I am not asking. I am not asking you to abandon public safety tools. I am not suggesting that license plate readers have no legitimate value. And I am not questioning the motives of anyone on this Council or in our police department.

What I am saying is that Flock Safety has proven, through its own documented actions, that it cannot be trusted to honor the commitments it makes to the cities that use its products. It changed the terms of our agreement without our consent. It deleted the only contractual protection against selling our data and lied about why. It granted itself permanent rights over information collected from our streets. And it structured the new agreement so that our recourse, if any, would be fought on its terms, in its state, under its rules.

This is not a company that made a mistake and is working to correct it. This is a company that is systematically repositioning itself to profit from the data of communities like ours while removing every safeguard that once stood in the way. The question before this Council is not whether Flock’s cameras have ever helped solve a crime. The question is whether we are willing to continue doing business with a company that has demonstrated it will say whatever is necessary to keep its cameras on our streets, and then change the rules once they are there.

There is also a deeper issue at stake that extends beyond any single vendor. A single photograph of a license plate at an intersection may not, on its own, constitute a search. But that is not what we are talking about anymore. When license plate data is collected continuously, across an entire city, fed into a nationwide database searchable by thousands of agencies, and combined with facial recognition technology, data broker records, AI-powered tracking, and the kind of broad data license Flock has now granted itself — the result is not a collection of photographs. It is a surveillance infrastructure capable of reconstructing where any person has been, when, and how often, without that person ever having been suspected of a crime. The Supreme Court recognized exactly this distinction in Carpenter v. United States, holding that a person does not surrender Fourth Amendment protection by venturing into the public sphere, and that the government cannot exploit technology to create a detailed chronicle of a person’s movements without constitutional limits. Yet the system and rules Flock is now operating under in Brookings follow the opposite principle: collect everything first, develop suspicion second. That is a violation of our privacy, of our civil liberties, and most clearly and importantly, our Fourth Amendment rights — and it is already here, built into the contract we are being asked to continue.

Some may feel reassured that the cameras currently installed in Brookings are standard license plate readers, not full surveillance cameras. I understand that instinct, but the reassurance does not survive scrutiny. Here are the facts:

• These cameras already have video capability that can be activated without your knowledge. Independent security researchers have demonstrated that Flock’s standard Falcon and Sparrow cameras — the same models deployed across South Dakota, including Brookings — can have their video servers activated wirelessly, enabling access to live camera feeds. This is not a future product or a theoretical risk. It is a documented capability that exists in the hardware already installed on our streets (Source: GainSec, CVE-2025-47818 and CVE-2025-59409, published September 2025; IPVM, “Flock Falcon Vulnerabilities Examined,” June 2025).

• Flock has announced plans to expand its ALPR cameras into full surveillance tools. The ACLU has documented that Flock is rolling out video capability, live feeds, 15-second clips, and AI-powered natural language search across its ALPR product line — with the ability to identify anything captured in the frame, including vehicle occupants and bystanders. In the ACLU’s words: “Imagine that a police officer stood on your street writing detailed notes about you every time you drove or walked by them… Now imagine that there is an army of police officers doing this on every block. This is the surveillance world that Flock is building.” (Source: ACLU, “Flock’s Aggressive Expansions Go Far Beyond Simple Driver Surveillance,” October 2025, aclu.org/news/privacy-technology/flock-roundup.)

• What Flock’s cameras capture may be more than what our police department is able to see. Public records obtained from Joplin, Missouri revealed that Flock cameras captured front-of-vehicle images — contradicting Flock’s claim that its cameras only photograph the rear of passing cars. Yet the images the city received were not the originals. They were reduced-resolution copies with unreliable timestamps and scrubbed metadata, delivered through Flock’s own platform. When Joplin requested the original files from the camera’s internal storage, it could not access them. Flock’s current Terms and Conditions confirm this arrangement is intentional. Section 4.1 states: “Flock retains the exclusive right to determine and control the method, timing, format, and medium of such access or delivery, and is not obligated to provide Customer Data in any alternative form, format, or transmission method outside of the Web Interface.” Put plainly: Flock decides what our police department sees, in what quality, and on what timeline. The city that pays for these cameras has no independent way to verify what is actually being captured, stored, or shared (Sources: Have I Been Flocked, “You Will Own Nothing,” March 2026, haveibeenflocked.com/news/own-nothing; Flock Safety Terms and Conditions, Section 4.1, flocksafety.com/legal/terms-and-conditions).

• Flock’s contract allows it to upgrade the platform and change capabilities without city approval. Flock’s own marketing promises “technology that’s always up- to-date” with “automatic updates and new features.” Its contract reserves the right to make unilateral platform upgrades — a provision that Berkeley’s Police Accountability Board specifically flagged as “unilateral platform upgrade authority” requiring amendment before approval (Source: Berkeley PAB Recommendations to City Council, March 2026).

• Even setting the hardware aside: Flock’s perpetual data license means the data already collected can be used indefinitely. Under the current contract, Flock holds a perpetual, irrevocable license to all data collected by these cameras. That data feeds into a nationwide database that Flock can enhance, combine with other data sources, and repurpose — regardless of what the cameras themselves can or cannot do today. The infrastructure for expanded surveillance does not require future approval from Brookings. It is already built into the agreement we are being asked to continue.

Taken together, this is the complete picture: cameras that already have undisclosed video capability, a company actively expanding those cameras into full surveillance tools, documented evidence that the “rear-only” claim is false, a contract that allows upgrades without city consent, and a perpetual data license that gives Flock the right to use everything collected however and whenever it chooses. The point is not that every one of these capabilities is being exercised in Brookings today. The point is that nothing in our current agreement prevents it, and Flock has already demonstrated — repeatedly — that it will expand its reach whenever it believes it can get away with it.

The case for ending this contract does not hinge on whether every member of this Council shares this constitutional concern. But it is one more reason — and an important one — to consider alongside everything else outlined in this letter.

A Question Worth Considering

If this Council had been presented with Flock’s February 2026 terms from the very beginning — a perpetual, irrevocable license over all customer data, no promise against selling that data, a blank-check clause allowing Flock to use our data however it sees fit, mandatory arbitration under Georgia law, and terms that Flock can rewrite at any time without notice — would you have approved this contract?

I believe the honest answer, for every member of this Council, is no. And if the current terms would not have been acceptable at the start, they cannot be acceptable now simply because we are already invested. That is not a reason to stay. That is how bad agreements survive.

What I Am Asking

I respectfully ask the Council to take the following steps:

First, cancel or decline to renew the city’s contract with Flock Safety at the earliest legal opportunity.

Second, freeze any expansion of Flock cameras or related surveillance technologies while this review takes place.

Third, publicly disclose the city’s contract, all related policies, all data-sharing practices, and whether the city has formally accepted or been subjected to Flock’s updated terms.

Fourth, hold a public meeting so residents can weigh in before any further action is taken.

Fifth, adopt a policy requiring that surveillance contracts cannot be materially altered by vendors without public notice, Council review, and explicit approval.

I know this is not a simple decision. Ending a contract means navigating logistics, answering questions about alternatives, and accepting short-term inconvenience. But the harder path is often the right one. When a vendor changes the rules after the fact, the question is not whether we can live with the new terms. The question is what kind of precedent we set by accepting them.

I do not believe anyone on this Council set out to give a private company expanding, permanent rights over data gathered from our streets. But that is the position we now find ourselves in. The facts have changed. The agreement we made in good faith no longer exists in any meaningful sense. And when that happens, the duty of leadership is not to rationalize it. The duty of leadership is to correct it.

We are on the same side. Every person in this conversation wants Brookings to be a safe place to raise a family, build a career, and grow old surrounded by neighbors who look out for one another. I am asking you to protect that vision by showing our community that when trust is broken, Brookings is willing to act.

Thank you for your time, your service, and your willingness to listen.

Sincerely,

Dr. Andrew Konechne
Brookings, South Dakota