Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage

Texas city demands $2M for public records on Flock usage Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows , some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them. On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data.

This Funding is relevant to the technology intelligence record because it involves DeveloperTools activity. The source article should remain the factual reference for follow-up coverage.

• Story text Size Small Standard Large Width * Standard Wide Links Standard Orange * Subscribers only Learn more As bipartisan backlash against Flock grows , some cities are asking anti-surveillance advocates and media outlets to pay eye-popping fees—including charging tens of thousands or even millions—to get information about how police departments are using and potentially abusing AI-enabled camera systems that track every vehicle that passes them.
• On Monday, the Texas Tribune reported that city officials in a Fort Worth suburb, North Richland Hills, asked one group to pay $2.3 million before it would fulfill a public records request for Flock data.
• To reach that high fee, officials claimed that searching “about a terabyte worth of communications about errors, misuse, and effectiveness of the Flock system” would take approximately 14 years of labor at a rate of $15 per hour.
• Phil Mynona, who filed the request using a pseudonym on behalf of his group, the Texas Privacy Coalition, told the Tribune that the fee seemed “ludicrous” and designed to stifle his public records searches.
• Mynona has sought similar records from more than 200 law enforcement agencies across the US, and he said it was impossible to predict how cities assessed fees for Flock records.
• Some cities provided more than 400,000 pages of documents for free, while others charged $5,000.