Flock Safety's 100,000 Cameras SPIED On Americans: Their Secret Plan to Ban Us
The short version: Dr. Josh C. Simmons digs into a Flock Safety controversy and the broader question of what 100,000+ ALPR cameras mean for Americans' privacy, and we think it's worth your attention.
Our Take
Dr. Josh C. Simmons' video lands on something we've been saying for a while: the scale of Flock Safety's camera network has outpaced the public conversation about it. Whatever the specific incident he's unpacking, the bigger story is the same one we keep returning to — a privately run, rapidly expanding grid of license plate readers now blankets thousands of American neighborhoods, feeding data into systems with murky rules, inconsistent oversight, and little input from the people being watched.
We can't verify every claim in a single video, and we'd encourage viewers to treat it as a starting point rather than gospel. But the underlying dynamic — a surveillance vendor growing faster than the legal and ethical frameworks meant to constrain it — is very real, and it's exactly why we built our camera map, so you can see for yourself how dense this coverage has gotten in your own town.
Credit to Simmons for pushing this into more living rooms. The more people who understand that these cameras aren't just sitting at one intersection but are networked, searchable, and shared across agencies, the more pressure builds for actual accountability. If this video gets you fired up, don't stop at watching — check out our take-action page for concrete ways to push back in your community.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Dr. Josh C. Simmons, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.