Flock Safety The Escalation of Mass Surveillance
The short version: FLNN's report lays out the math: 90,000+ Flock cameras, 20 billion scans a month, and less than 1% tied to actual investigations — the rest is just surveillance of everyone else.
Our Take
Frontal Lobe News Network put a number on something we've been saying for a while: the vast majority of what Flock Safety's ALPR network collects has nothing to do with solving crimes. Their report cites over 90,000 cameras nationwide pulling in 20 billion vehicle scans a month, with less than 1% ever connecting to an active investigation. That's not a rounding error — that's the entire business model. When 99% of the data is just cataloguing where ordinary people drive, park, worship, and seek medical care, calling it a 'crime-fighting tool' is doing a lot of heavy lifting for the marketing department.
The report also digs into the mission creep we track constantly: plate data getting pulled for political surveillance, tracking people crossing state lines for healthcare, and employees peeking at scans for personal reasons. None of that requires a warrant, a judge, or even much oversight — because Flock's Vehicle Fingerprint™ system builds a searchable profile of your car's color, make, model, and dents whether or not you've ever been suspected of anything. Good reporting like this matters because it forces the conversation past 'is this camera catching bad guys' and into 'what happens to everyone else's data once it exists.'
If you want to see how close this network already is to your own neighborhood, check our camera map, and if you're ready to push back locally, our take-action page has the tools to start.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Frontal Lobe News Network (FLNN), published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.