A while ago, in “The Burden of Compliance Shouldn’t Stand in the Way of Public Safety,” I documented how Flock banned both me and our friends at EyesOnFlock.com from accessing transparency portals.

Needless to say, I took issue with what amounts to retaliation—denying access to public records—for protected First Amendment activity on this website.

So I changed the User-Agent (the string that identifies your browser to websites) for our importer from "HaveIBeenFlocked/1.0 (Transparency Portal Archival)" to "Privately-owned Tool Archiving Public Records for Non-Commercial Purposes to Support the Exercise of Protected First Amendment Rights".

You know, so we’re all on the same page.

Flock didn’t appreciate the circumvention. Its response: ban all VPN users.

Viewing public records about government surveillance now requires disclosing your identity to that government’s surveillance vendor. The portals exist to let citizens see who’s being tracked in their community. Flock has made accessing them contingent on being trackable yourself.

This isn’t a policy choice made through democratic process. When legislators have proposed VPN bans—even narrow ones targeting age verification—they’ve faced immediate constitutional challenges.^[1] Flock skipped that step. It simply implemented the restriction on government records it hosts.

The company talks constantly about transparency and local control. It might start by accounting for the 90% of California logs that have vanished—an analysis only possible through data from these same portals.