Flock Safety's Security Chief on Camera Abuse

Our Take

Give credit where it's due: it's notable that Flock Safety's Chief Information Security Officer, Chris Castaldo, sat down with Frank Downs and Dr. Dustin Brewer on Legitimate Cybersecurity to talk openly about officers abusing license-plate searches to track exes and other personal targets. That's not a hypothetical civil-liberties worry anymore — it's Flock's own security chief confirming what critics have said for years: give thousands of officers frictionless access to a nationwide plate-tracking database, and some of them will use it to stalk people, not fight crime.

A shortened default retention window and a promise of better auditing are fine as far as they go, but they're policy tweaks bolted onto a system built for constant, dragnet surveillance of everyone's movements, not just suspects. Audit logs only catch abuse after the fact, if anyone bothers to look, and "we're changing our defaults" doesn't undo the fact that this technology was normalized on your street before most residents ever got a vote on it.

This is exactly why we track where these cameras are going up — check our camera map to see what's near you — and why we keep pushing residents to show up at city council meetings before the next contract gets signed. If your town is considering Flock, or already has it, our take-action page has the tools to push back.