Does your police department’s plate data reach the feds?
Automated license plate readers photograph every passing car. The agencies that run them can share those reads with other agencies — including federal ones. This page renders what the agencies themselves publish about that sharing, and counts the ones that publish nothing.
Who discloses anything at all.
2,662 law-enforcement agencies are recorded as operating Flock ALPR cameras — recorded by EFF’s Atlas of Surveillance and by our own portal captures, as of August 21, 2026. Of those, 1 publish a transparency portal we have captured. 1 publishes a named sharing list.
That means 2,661 of 2,662 publish no named sharing list we have found. Absence is not clearance — it means the public cannot check. And an agency missing from the count entirely has not been checked, not cleared: the Atlas itself undercounts.
What the lists that do exist show.
Anoka County MN SO (MN) publishes a named list of 705 agencies it shares plate reads with, captured August 15, 2026. 1 entry carries the portal’s own federal marker:
- [Federal] Midwest HIDTA — share type unspecified, on the published list since August 15, 2026
Every name above, including the federal marker itself, is the publishing agency’s own labeling, preserved verbatim from its transparency portal. We render the agency’s disclosure; we do not classify.
Three honest states.
A named list shows who receives the data, as of its capture date. It says nothing about how often the access is used. A count without names says data is shared with an undisclosed set of agencies. Nothing published — today’s most common answer by far — is not clearance. It means the agency has left the public nothing to check.
Where this comes from.
Portal figures are captured by our transparency crawler, which reads the public pages agencies and their vendor already publish, about weekly. Dates shown are when an entry was first observed on a list, not when sharing began. Operator counts derive from the Atlas of Surveillance, a project of the Electronic Frontier Foundation and the Reynolds School of Journalism at the University of Nevada, Reno (CC BY 4.0). Everything on this page is at the agency level only — nothing here is about an individual person, plate, or driver.
The full agency records behind these counts are searchable in the archive.