Georgia Man's Flock Lawsuit Exposes Hollow Audit Trail
Surveillance control · 14.10.2026

A businessman from Georgia is suing Flock and the Coweta County sheriff — and the case turned out to be quite telling.

Tyler Markerson was first detained in February 2023, allegedly for not wearing a seatbelt. The charges were later dropped. In September 2024, he sued the department for excessive force. While that lawsuit was still ongoing, his license plate kept getting run through the Flock camera system for some reason. On top of that, he claims, sheriff's vehicles followed and tailed him — for no reason, just on his way to and from home.

The most interesting part is in the justifications given for these searches. The Flock system requires officers to enter a reason for each search, but the field is just plain text, and you can type anything into it. In one department, according to the lawsuit, staff entered the justification "hehehe" twenty times in a row. For Markerson's vehicle, they used even more "meaningful" entries: "info" and "37." Neither one corresponds to any investigation, case, or call.

The plaintiff's lawyers put it elegantly: such an entry doesn't document an investigation. It only documents that someone typed something.

The lawsuit points out directly: Flock's own conduct effectively admits that the platform should have required a verifiable justification from law enforcement before running a search. In other words, mass surveillance of citizens' vehicles rested entirely on an officer's word and an empty text field where even a chuckle would do.

A technology meant "for investigations only" works in practice as "for whatever I feel like typing." The difference between surveillance tied to a case and surveillance driven by curiosity here comes down to exactly one line of text — and even that wasn't checked.

Source: https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2026/10/georgia-man-sues-flock-sheriffs-office-over-alleged-alpr-fueled-retaliation/