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ACLU Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project

October 14, 2026

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If your community is using Flock, Axon, Motorola, or another automatic license plate reader (ALPR) provider, or considering doing so, there’s a new question you need to ask those pushing the tech: Will the data your police department collects on innocent people’s locations be funneled to ICE and other federal agencies through a war-on-drugs era program called the “High Intensity Drug Trafficking Area” (HIDTA)?

According to documents obtained and recently reported upon by the creator of HaveIBeenFlocked and the tech news outlet 404Media , the government is using the HIDTA program “to obtain data from local cops’ Flock, Axon, and other ALPR cameras and aggregate it on federal government servers, where it is then accessible to other federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies.”

HIDTA is under the jurisdiction of the White House’s Office of National Drug Control Policy, a.k.a.…