FLOCK Cameras. Now able to Search PEOPLE... Not only License Plates - Yakima WA #flock
The short version: Sky's Shutter Media's Yakima report shows Flock's 'license plate reader' quietly fingerprints entire vehicles and, per the company's own feature set, people — proving the mission always creeps.
Our Take
Credit to Sky's Shutter Media for pulling back the curtain on Yakima, WA, where a system sold to residents as a narrow license-plate tool is doing a lot more than reading plates. Every car that rolls past a Flock camera gets photographed, time-stamped, geo-tagged, and reduced to a "vehicle fingerprint" — decals, roof racks, dents, bumper stickers, the works. That means even a car with no visible plate, or a plate deliberately obscured, is still trackable. The pitch to city councils is always the same: stolen cars, Amber Alerts, violent felons. The technology installed is something else entirely — a persistent, searchable ledger of where every vehicle in town has been.
This is the pattern we track at DeFlock: the ALPR label is a marketing choice, not a technical limit. Once a network exists that can identify a car by its scratches and stickers, extending that same logic to people — gait, clothing, habitual routes — is a policy decision, not a technological leap. Yakima residents were never asked to approve a general-purpose vehicle and movement surveillance grid. They were told it was for stolen cars. Nobody votes for mission creep; it just arrives with a software update.
If you want to know whether your own neighborhood has quietly signed up for this, check our camera map to see what's nearby, and if you're ready to push back on a city council or police department selling you the narrow version of a very unnarrow system, our take-action page has concrete steps.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of Sky's Shutter Media, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.