The town of Littleton, Massachusetts is moving to cancel its contract with Flock Safety after officials discovered that five automated license plate reader cameras the town had ordered switched off had been quietly turned back on by the company.
In a July 30 announcement, the town said the Select Board had directed Town Counsel to initiate cancellation of the contract with Flock Safety. The discovery that the cameras were live again turned an ordinary procurement decision into something more pointed: a question about who actually controls surveillance equipment installed on a town’s own public ways.
How the cameras came back on
The sequence, as described by the town, is mundane in its mechanics and unsettling in its implications.
The Select Board voted to de-energize the cameras. The Police Department relayed that vote to Flock — telling the company the board “had voted to de-energize the cameras” — but, by its own account, did not explicitly inform Flock that the town was also turning the cameras off at the town level.
Some time later a detective logged into the Flock system to confirm the cameras were still dark. They were not. Five cameras installed on Littleton public ways were running again.
Police Chief Douglas Landry explained that power had been restored based on Flock’s standard operating procedure, since the company was unaware the town did not intend to turn the cameras back on. In other words: from Flock’s side, a customer’s cameras had gone offline, and the routine response to an offline camera is to bring it back up.
The part that alarms privacy advocates
Town officials said no data collected by the cameras was shared with other jurisdictions while the devices were powered, and that the Littleton Police Department did not access any data gathered during that window. That is a meaningful mitigation, and it should be stated plainly rather than buried.
But the underlying fact survives the mitigation. A vendor was able to restore surveillance capability on municipal infrastructure without the municipality’s knowledge, and the town only found out because an officer happened to check. Whether the reactivation was malicious is almost beside the point — the incident demonstrates that the off switch the town believed it held was not, in practice, entirely in its hands.
Automated license plate readers capture a plate, a timestamp and a location for every vehicle that passes. Aggregated across a network, that produces a searchable record of vehicle movement. The reason communities argue about the off switch is that the data is retrospective: once collected, it can be queried later for purposes nobody debated when the cameras went in.
Not the first time
Littleton is part of a pattern that has now repeated across multiple states.
In Evanston, Illinois, the city covered its cameras and issued a cease-and-desist order after Flock reinstalled cameras without authorization. In Cambridge, Massachusetts, officials announced in December that after a batch of Flock cameras had been removed, two were installed without notification — and the city terminated its contract as a result.
Three incidents in three communities, each ending in escalation or cancellation, is difficult to characterise as a series of isolated misunderstandings. It suggests a company whose operational defaults assume continuity of service, deployed into a political environment where the customer’s ability to stop the service on demand is the entire basis of consent.
A rough year for Flock
The Littleton dispute arrives during a broader reckoning for the company. More than 20 local jurisdictions have moved toward cancelling contracts over surveillance concerns, and the backlash has been bipartisan — a rare alignment between civil liberties groups on the left and limited-government conservatives on the right.
Separately, reporting revealed that Flock had pitched a plan to expand its network far beyond fixed poles — a proposal involving dashcams in roughly 350,000 rideshare and delivery vehicles that would have turned ordinary drivers into a roaming plate-reading fleet. The company says that partnership was never executed, but its existence as a strategy document has shaped how towns now read the fine print.
What towns should take from this
The practical lesson in Littleton is contractual, not technical. Several provisions are worth insisting on before any ALPR deployment:
- An enforceable kill switch. The municipality, not the vendor, should hold the authority to disable cameras, with a written requirement that the vendor may not restore service without documented written authorization.
- Change notification. Any installation, removal, reactivation or firmware change must be reported to the town within a defined window.
- Audit access. The town should be able to pull logs of every query run against its data and every configuration change made to its devices — without asking the vendor to produce them.
- Data ownership and deletion. Clear retention limits, and a contractual right to certified deletion at termination.
- Sharing controls. Explicit consent required before any data leaves the jurisdiction, including to state or federal partners.
Littleton got a relatively soft version of this problem: cameras that ran for a period without anyone accessing the data. The next town may not be as lucky, and the fix is not better vendor intentions — it is a contract that makes the town’s off switch the only one that matters.
