Cops Used 'LMAO' To Search 19,000 License Plate Cameras

One officer at the Lake County, Indiana Sheriff's Department searched a license plate across more than 19,000 Flock cameras in 1,558 cities and towns last summer. The logged reason for the search was "LMAO." That is not the punchline. That is the accountability mechanism.

What The Audit Logs Actually Showed

The Electronic Frontier Foundation pulled Flock's Automatic License Plate Reader search logs through public records requests, and the free-text "reason for search" field reads like an unmoderated group chat. Reviewed entries included "LMAO," "LOL," "Hehe," "Haha," "idk," "blah," "asdfg," and strings of apparently random keyboard characters."Sexy" also made the list.

The scale is the part that should stop you. On May 7, 2025, a Goshen Police Department officer searched 6,474 ALPR networks representing 82,413 cameras. The reason logged in the field where the justification is supposed to live was "idk."ALPR databases operate with no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes. The reason field was the accountability layer. It was a text box. Officers typed jokes into it and the searches ran.

The records, obtained by the EFF through a public records request, show officers repeatedly typing flippant or nonsensical answers into the mandatory "reason for search" field, over years, across the US, without offering any legitimate justification. Departments have pushed back that the searches were often attached to real investigations, and some of them probably were. The logs neither prove nor disprove that. They only prove nobody was reading them.

Flock's Fix Makes The Paper Trail Thinner, Not Better

Flock's response was to swap the free-text box for a dropdown menu of pre-set reasons. The company's own fix for the problem may have made it worse. An officer who typed "LMAO" at least generated a searchable, absurd, obviously-not-a-reason string that a journalist or auditor could grep for. A dropdown produces a clean, compliant-looking entry, "investigation," "suspicious vehicle", every time. The nonsense becomes invisible.

This is compliance theatre at its most efficient. A dropdown is not a warrant. It is one click, and it produces a record that looks exactly like every other record.

The structural problem sits underneath the interface. With no warrant requirements, limited guardrails, and deficient audit processes, ALPR databases have fostered a culture of unrestricted access to everyone's location information, police treating a mass surveillance network like their own personal search engine, tracking the movements of everyday citizens for low-level complaints, personal whims, and sometimes, seemingly, for the lols.

Canada is not exempt from the read here, even though the specific logs are American. Flock operates in Canadian municipalities. The federal privacy framework treats ALPR data as personal information, but municipal-level deployments have moved faster than provincial oversight, and the audit-log question, who reviews the reason field, and with what consequence, is unresolved on this side of the border too. This is the same pattern EV buyers should be watching in connected-car telematics: the guardrail everyone points to is the one nobody actually enforces. The data-flow questions that matter for connected vehicles are a version of this same argument, one product category over.

The Guardrail Was Working Exactly As Designed

The gibberish did not break the system. It revealed what the system always was: voluntary self-reporting with no enforcement consequence on the other end. A dropdown does not change that incentive structure. It just makes the absurdity legible only to Flock and the subscribing agency.

The legislative fix is a warrant requirement. Every jurisdiction that has not passed one, and that is most of them, on both sides of the 49th, has implicitly decided that "LMAO" is a tolerable price for the convenience. For buyers thinking about what a used EV's data trail looks like at resale, or what the used-EV market's expansion means for privacy at scale, the lesson generalises. The audit log is only as strong as the person who reads it, and here, nobody was.

The Dropdown Is Not The Story. The Absence Of A Warrant Is.

The Flock interface change will move the headlines off "LMAO" within a news cycle. It will not move the underlying number: 82,413 cameras queried in a single day by one officer who could not, or would not, name a reason. If provincial legislators want a checkpoint that matters, it is a warrant requirement with a suppression remedy, not a better-designed text box. The number to watch is not what officers type. It is how many jurisdictions require a judge to sign off before the search runs at all.