A Cop Searched 19,000 Flock Cameras Across 1,558 Cities. His Reason: 'LMAO'
A routine police search might involve looking for a stolen car or a wanted suspect. But one officer's reason for searching a vast network of automated licence plate readers was simply 'LMAO'.In July 2025, an officer with the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff's Department used Flock Safety's surveillance system to search for a licence plate across more than 19,000 cameras covering 1,558 cities and towns. According to a record of the search, the reason entered was 'LMAO'.The case was among dozens identified in an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of Flock's search logs.
- ▪A routine police search might involve looking for a stolen car or a wanted suspect.
- ▪But one officer's reason for searching a vast network of automated licence plate readers was simply 'LMAO'.In July 2025, an officer with the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff's Department used Flock Safety's surveillance system to search for a
- ▪According to a record of the search, the reason entered was 'LMAO'.The case was among dozens identified in an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of Flock's search logs.
2 outlets in our directory ran this story, first to last over 23 hours. All of the coverage we found sits in one bucket: lean left. That one-sidedness is itself worth noticing.
Hacker News (Front Page) files mainly under programming. We currently carry 1,672 of its stories. Top-voted stories on Hacker News.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Tech Times UK |
| Canonical URL | https://www.techtimes.co.uk/police-flock-search-licence-plate-lmao-1808683 |
| Publication time | Tue, 15 Sep 2026 14:47:21 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-09-15T15:01:52.471Z |
| Last seen | 2026-09-15T15:01:52.471Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | CYq9tXActS-E · 2 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
A routine police search might involve looking for a stolen car or a wanted suspect. But one officer's reason for searching a vast network of automated licence plate readers was simply 'LMAO'.In July 2025, an officer with the Lake County, Indiana, Sheriff's Department used Flock Safety's surveillance system to search for a licence plate across more than 19,000 cameras covering 1,558 cities and towns. According to a record of the search, the reason entered was 'LMAO'.The case was among dozens identified in an analysis by the Electronic Frontier Foundation of Flock's search logs.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Tech Times UK.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Tech Times UK
