There are over 120,000 of Flock’s automatic license plate reader (ALPR) cameras installed all over the US. Flock’s cameras, and others like them, use AI to identify and track vehicles based on their license plate number, make, model, color, and other info, networked together to track vehicles and people’s movements throughout the day and across the country.
Dozens of communities have canceled contracts for the cameras or turned them off, including Los Angeles , as officials have pushed for more limits on the data they collect, who has access to it, and how it can be used in the future. Earlier this year, Amazon-owned Ring canceled a partnership with Flock after online backlash.
Today, I’m talking with Benn Jordan, musician, YouTuber, researcher, and investigative journalist. You might know Benn from those first two titles — he’s got a prolific discography of experimental music dating back decades.
But in the last couple of years, he’s become a high-profile face in the creator and media spaces for his work investigating Flock Safety, the maker of automatic license plate readers and the software that powers them.
A pair of sheriff’s deputies in Pinellas County, Florida, were arrested on felony charges by their own department for using official databases to look up women they were interested in — including a 17-year-old girl.
One of the sheriff’s deputies, Karl Gwynne, reportedly looked up a woman on the agency’s automatic license plate reader database 300 times.
Flock is in the hot seat in Washington, even if its CEO declined to actually face senators at a hearing about its “AI Surveillance Network” on Wednesday.
“There’s many players in this industry, but there’s one name that really stands out above the rest, and that is Flock,” Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) said. “If you haven’t heard of Flock, all I have to say is, Flock’s probably heard of you.”
There’s still a standby line to get into the Senate Judiciary crime and counterterrorism subcommittee’s hearing about “Flock’s Nationwide AI Surveillance Network.” Chair Josh Hawley (R-MO) invited the CEOs of Flock and its peers, Axon, Motorola Solutions, and Verkada, but said they declined .
Apparently that’s what Flock cameras are silently telling themselves about every two minutes. 404 Media and Wired collaborated on reporting about hackers who broke inside the surveillance cameras and picked through their custom Android apps, data collection habits, and machine vision methods. Flock doesn’t seem happy, and the hackers are trying to “keep a low profile.”
From Florida to Washington state , local governments across the country are canceling their contracts with Flock, the company behind the controversial AI-enabled license plate readers, in response to public outcry. But ending the contracts doesn’t necessarily mean the cameras will come down immediately — or that the information they’ve gathered will be deleted anytime soon.
Even as state and local governments decide to rein in their surveillance capabilities, uncertainty remains about what Flock can and will do with data that has already been collected. Each jurisdiction’s contract is different, but many of them let Flock retain data long after it’s been collected. “Let’s say they terminate,” said Saira Hussain, a senior staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation who has reviewed dozens of municipal Flock contracts. “What happens to the data, and how long is it able to be searched? That question appears to be unresolved.”
Florida is banning Flock cameras and other automated license plate readers across state highways, as reported earlier by NBC News and local news outlet WUSF . In a memo on Monday , Florida’s Department of Transportation says it’s revoking permits for all license plate readers, adding that they must be removed from state highways within 30 days.
As noted in the memo, Florida’s DOT says it’s issuing the order in response to the “recent exponential increase in deployments” of license plate readers, “coupled with concerning reports of misuse, data privacy concerns, and surveillance schemes.” The agency is also halting future requests for license plate reader placements on state roadways.
The San Antonio Express-News reports that a request from Pflugerville, TX, resident Sam Aly found that hundreds of unauthorized agencies were searching the city’s Flock data , even though the company claims only two agencies were improperly included. The City Council canceled Flock’s contract last week and covered its cameras .
Between February 16 and August 15, 2026, outside agencies searched Pflugerville’s camera data 1,597,918 times. 1.6 million searches in six months. 459 different agencies searched us. That works out to roughly 8,900 outside searches per day, every day. Our own police department ran 5,078 searches in the same period. So for every 1 search by Pflugerville PD, outside agencies ran 315.
As backlash grows over Flock’s AI surveillance cameras, Texas Governor Greg Abbott has frozen state spending on them. The move came just ahead of the publication of a Texas Tribune investigation that revealed the state spent over $30 million on Flock cameras. That money was primarily raised by tacking a $1 fee onto insurance policies, allegedly to help fight catalytic converter theft.
Flock cameras have increasingly drawn ire from across the political spectrum as they’ve become the subject of privacy concerns. There have been multiple incidents of officers being placed on leave or criminally charged for misusing Flock systems, including at least six in Texas alone. The company has also come under scrutiny for its data-sharing , the placement of some of its cameras near playgrounds , its own employees’ access to video feeds, unsecured video feeds , and its ham-fisted attempts to avoid transparency .
Americans have declared war on Flock cameras. They’ve protested them, damaged them , and destroyed them . This is only the beginning.
The spontaneous and decentralized nature of the vigilante protests is also what makes them difficult to suppress. There isn’t a uniform method of disruption; people have done everything from unplugging, smashing, stealing, and spray-painting the surveillance devices to taking less destructive actions like physically blocking the cameras for hours. Some of the culprits have been caught , but that clearly hasn’t dissuaded others from taking matters into their own hands.
Did you know there’s a website you can check to see if Flock customers (like policing and surveillance agencies) have searched for your license plate number? Have I Been Flocked? warns users that its data is incomplete, but developer Cris van Pelt told Business Insider that visits to the database have “exploded.”
YouTuber Benn Jordan got blocked from Flock’s “public safety” conference in Atlanta, but that didn’t stop him from seeing what was going on anyway.
Emperor Palpatine may have dissolved Imperial democracy, but that’s not stopping Darth Vader from appearing at a public San Diego city council meeting in defense of Flock surveillance. Once again, he definitely does not have the high ground.
Surveillance tech company Flock is rolling out updates to address reports of cops across the country abusing its tools to stalk ex-romantic partners and others. CEO Garrett Langley is delivering a mea culpa, and in an interview with The Verge , says he’s changed his mind on what responsibility Flock bears for how law enforcement uses it.
Over the coming weeks, Flock will begin implementing updates that include requiring a previously optional feature called Audit Assistance, which flags “abnormal search behavior” and immediately locks out suspicious users until an administrator reviews their activity. All users will also be required to enter case codes to run searches, ideally limiting the ability to run a query for personal or nefarious purposes. This can be overridden by an administrator for emergency situations, like tracking a missing child, but those will automatically be flagged for review.
As BoingBoing notes , a Tennessee candidate for Congress was charged for four counts of felony vandalism for allegedly shooting up Flock cameras. The Blount County sheriff’s office says the suspect admitted to shooting the “ALPR systems” over about a week in July. To say these systems are unpopular is becoming an understatement.
Joel Feder at The Drive reported a frightening story about how Flock cameras , recently suspended by the LAPD, tracked him in Minnesota and sent police after him over “stolen plates.” (They were not.) Flock says its cameras worked “correctly” in the lead-up to a potentially deadly incident. But here we are in our new era of computer policing .
Over the weekend, the three-year deal for Flock Safety’s 138 pole-mounted surveillance cameras came to an end, as the LA Times reports the LAPD CIO says it ended the arrangement while working on a new contract that has “very clear terms” about who owns the data collected and what happens to it .
An unnamed spokesperson for Flock told media outlets that unspecified “misconceptions” led to the pause.
On Thursday, the Instagram account for a lecture series in Newport Beach, CA posted a photo of what appeared to be a cease and desist letter from the surveillance technology company Flock Safety. Flock has received significant backlash over its technology and work with law enforcement agencies, and this letter kicked off yet another wave of criticism against the company for allegedly trying to shut down discussions of its work.
“WE WILL NOT BE SILENCED,” the group, The Saturday Salon, wrote in the Instagram post , which has more than 3,000 likes. A separate post about the letter on Bluesky has more than 360 reposts . The text of the letter demands that the group stop hosting conversations about Flock’s surveillance technology. In a DM from The Saturday Salon’s Instagram account, Schuyler Lifschultz tells The Verge that it “found this letter taped to our front door.”
A report from 404 Media shows how more than a dozen cases around the US have shown police using Flock to illegally stalk victims . Flock acknowledged it’s aware of 15 incidents, claiming“each surfaced because of the transparency and accountability features deliberately built into our platform.”
But that doesn’t reflect how some victims only found out by using the HaveIBeenFlocked.com website that Flock has tried to have taken down, or the many years of similar reports with other surveillance tech, a problem the NSA tagged “ LOVEINT .”
Today, let’s talk about the camera company Ring, lost dogs, and the surveillance state.
You probably saw this ad during the Super Bowl a couple of weekends ago:
The most striking thing about Ring’s statement that it had parted ways with Flock Safety is what the home security company didn’t say. There was no mention of the public backlash around ties to ICE , or any promise to address users’ concerns about the company’s relationships with law enforcement .
In an increasingly authoritarian political climate, the threat of mass surveillance fueled by AI-powered cameras is what many people fear. Yet Ring’s statement made no attempt to address this. Instead, the company claims it canceled Flock’s integration with its Community Requests tool because it would “require significantly more time and resources than anticipated.”
After Ring announced that it had canceled integration with Flock Safety, the law enforcement technology company criticized for connections to ICE (a claim it denies ) has released it’s own statement and blog post :
Over the past several months, Flock and Ring explored whether their respective platforms could responsibly complement one another in support of public safety. Throughout those discussions, Flock engaged extensively with customers, public officials, and community stakeholders to understand expectations around accountability, transparency, and lawful use.
Based on that engagement, Flock and Ring have chosen to cancel the planned integration.
Following intense backlash to its partnership with Flock Safety , a surveillance technology company that works with law enforcement agencies, Ring has announced it is canceling the integration.
In a statement published on Ring’s blog and provided to The Verge ahead of publication, the company said: “Following a comprehensive review, we determined the planned Flock Safety integration would require significantly more time and resources than anticipated. We therefore made the joint decision to cancel the integration and continue with our current partners … The integration never launched, so no Ring customer videos were ever sent to Flock Safety.”
The livestreams connected to more than 60 of Flock’s AI-powered surveillance cameras were left available to view on the web, allowing someone to see live feeds of each location without needing a username or password, according to findings from tech YouTuber Benn Jordan and 404 Media .
Flock is a technology company that works with thousands of law enforcement agencies and businesses to deploy a network of AI-powered cameras across the country. It also recently partnered with Ring , giving Flock customers the ability to request footage from users in Ring’s Neighbors app. As noted by 404 Media , many of Flock’s cameras are made to scan a vehicle’s license plates . However, the feeds exposed to the internet connect to Flock’s Condor cameras, which can pan, tilt, and zoom to automatically track people and vehicles .
An exposed dataset from the license plate surveillance company Flock, which is known to work with the US Border Patrol and ICE via local police , showed that some of the AI annotators paid to classify American license plates are located in the Philippines.
After 404 Media contacted Flock for comment, the dataset disappeared.
This is the title for the native ad
