Flock Security and the Rise of Mass Vehicle Surveillance | Featuring Jon McCray Jones

Our Take

Credit to the Chicago Justice Project and host John McCray Jones for kicking off what looks like a serious, ongoing investigation into Flock Safety rather than a one-off explainer. That distinction matters. Flock's ALPR network isn't a single vendor selling a single town a single camera — it's a de facto national surveillance grid, built quietly through thousands of individual city council votes, HOA contracts, and police department purchase orders, with almost no federal oversight tying it together. A local newsroom or watchdog treating this as a beat instead of a headline is exactly the kind of scrutiny this system has been able to avoid for years.

The questions raised in this episode — who can query the data, what safeguards exist, how long records are kept, and which of the thousands of agencies on Flock's network can pull your travel history — are the same ones we keep hammering on. The honest answer, most places, is that oversight is thin to nonexistent. Data gets shared across jurisdiction lines and even across state lines, often with no warrant requirement, no meaningful audit trail, and no notice to the people whose movements are being logged. That's not a hypothetical civil liberties concern; it's the current default setting in a lot of American cities.

If you want to see how close this network already is to your own driveway, check our camera map — and if you're ready to push back on a deployment in your community, our take-action page has concrete steps for showing up at the city council meeting where these contracts actually get decided.