In January 2025, a lawyer for Flock Safety — the company that has quietly wired more than a hundred thousand license plate readers into American streets — sent a cease-and-desist letter to one volunteer developer. His offense: building a free, open-source map of where the cameras are.
Will Freeman’s project, DeFlock, had at that point charted roughly 16,000 automated license plate readers worldwide — Flock’s, Motorola’s, anyone’s. It didn’t hack anything. It didn’t touch a single camera. It collected what any pedestrian can see from a public sidewalk: a pole, a lens, a location. Flock’s outside counsel demanded Freeman stop using the name “DeFlock” anywhere — site, promotion, all of it.
The legal theory told on itself
Here’s the detail most coverage skimmed past, first reported by 404 Media: Flock didn’t claim trademark infringement — the claim you’d expect if the company believed people genuinely confused a protest map with its own products. It claimed trademark dilution: that the name “DeFlock” blurred and tarnished the Flock brand.
Think about what a tarnishment complaint concedes. It concedes nobody is confused. It says, in effect: this map makes us look bad. That isn’t an intellectual-property problem. That’s a criticism problem — and in the United States, criticism is not something a surveillance vendor gets to license.
Four words: no
Freeman didn’t fold, and he didn’t go alone. The Electronic Frontier Foundation took his case, and senior staff attorney Cara Gagliano’s response letter called the claims “groundless” and said Freeman would not be complying — pointing to the explicit carve-out in federal anti-dilution law for noncommercial commentary and criticism. Naming a watchdog project after the thing it watches is about as protected as speech gets.
The company whose pitch to city councils is “if you’ve done nothing wrong, you have nothing to fear from being tracked” discovered it did not enjoy being mapped, and reached for lawyers.
And the lawyers were the polite version. Months after the EFF’s refusal, Flock CEO Garrett Langley described the mapping project as “terroristic” in a video interview with Forbes — a characterization reported by NPR, which noted Flock declined to explain the word choice. Freeman’s response was essentially bewilderment: all the project does is write down where the cameras are. That’s the CEO of a company logging hundreds of millions of car trips calling a public map of poles terrorism.
The map since the threat
When that letter went out, DeFlock tracked around 16,000 cameras. As we publish this, the number sits at more than 112,000 — a sevenfold jump in under a year and a half, pin by pin, submitted by ordinary people who walked past a pole and decided to write it down. Legal threats against volunteers turn out to be excellent recruiting material for volunteers.
You can browse that data on our camera map, which is powered by the DeFlock project’s open data. (The usual disclosure: we’re an independent awareness brand, not affiliated with deflock.me — we’re fans, and we think their work matters. This fight is exactly why.)
Why this story still matters
Flock’s cameras photograph your plate, your vehicle, and your movements without a warrant, and the company’s position is that this is all perfectly reasonable in public. A map of camera poles — built from what’s visible in public — met a cease-and-desist within weeks of getting attention. Hold those two facts next to each other. The asymmetry is the whole story: surveillance for you, secrecy for them.
It also tells you something practical: documentation works. A company does not send lawyers after things that don’t threaten it. Every reported pole makes the network harder to deny and easier to debate at a city council meeting — which is where this fight actually gets won. If you’ve seen a camera on your street, report it to the map, then check what you can do locally.
They tried to erase the map. The map got bigger. Keep it growing.
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