By Alia Sinclair

SeaTac Chief of Police Troy Smithmeyer spoke before the SeaTac City Council Tuesday night, Oct. 28, 2025 to address concerns raised by University of Washington Center for Human Right’s October report entitled “Leaving the Door Wide Open: Flock Surveillance Systems Expose Washington Data to Immigration Enforcement” in which it was revealed at least 10 Washington police departments which did not explicitly authorize Border Patrol searches of their network data had inadvertently granted “back door” access to federal agencies. 

Chief Smithmeyer explained that the Flock system includes a feature called “national lookup.” This feature allows law enforcement to track a suspected crime across state lines. For example, if a crime originated in SeaTac but the perpetrator crossed state lines, law enforcement would still be able to locate them in a different state.

Chief Smithmeyer shared that this technology recently allowed his police force to recue a human trafficking victim who was captured in SeaTac and driven to California. For this reason, the SeaTac Flock system had the national lookup feature enabled.

Unbeknownst to Chief Smithmeyer, Flock had launched an undisclosed pilot program that allowed HSI and Border Patrol access to the national lookup feature also. This allows “side door access” to data in the Flock systems of other cities in other states.

Chief Smithmeyer was quick to point out that this does not mean federal agents have direct access to SeaTac’s data or cameras—but it does mean that if federal agents conducted a nation-wide search on a license plate that happened to drive through SeaTac, it would show up for them. 

Now that he is aware of these loopholes in the Flock system, Chief Smithmeyer has tightened up any areas that may be used by federal agents for the purposes of immigration enforcement.

“We have closed the loop,” Smithmeyer said. “We have taken off national search. We have also taken off state-wide search, and we have done our due diligence at least to this point. There are a few agencies within the state of Washington who have elected officials who have said, ‘yeah, we’re not going to follow the state of Washington’s constitution and their laws as far as it goes to immigration’, that is their interpretation of [the law] and they’re going to use the [Flock] system how they seem it fit. We have also taken them off. We have closed all the loops we can.”

A representative from Flock present at the council meeting stated:

“I have no reason to believe that SeaTac cameras have been used for immigration specific purposes. That being said, I don’t have access to your audit logs to understand exactly what searches have been run by agencies on your network.”

The Flock representative also explained that each Flock customer owns and controls their data and sharing relationships individually.

“There should not be any Federal agencies with access to your networks,” the Flock rep said. “Every customer owns and controls their data and sharing relationships. Flock is not going to share that without express customer permission.”

The representative also went on to state that the pilot program allowing HSI and Border Patrol national lookup access has been paused with no plans to continue.

“We have paused those two particular pilot [programs] outright as well. As soon as we discovered that agencies had accepted sharing requests from states like Washington with [HSI and Border Patrol] we immediately paused those pilots nationwide.”