Flock Cameras America's Hidden Surveillance Network
The short version: SecurityEvolution's breakdown of Flock Safety's ALPR grid underscores a truth we keep hammering: the cameras are everywhere, the oversight is nowhere.
Our Take
Credit to the channel SecurityEvolution for laying out in plain terms what we've been documenting for a while: Flock Safety's network of license plate readers has quietly become one of the largest surveillance systems in the country, and almost nobody voted for it. These cameras aren't federal infrastructure dropped in by some agency with a mandate — they're sold HOA by HOA, police department by police department, often with zero public hearing and even less public understanding of how long that data sits in a database or who else gets to query it.
The video's framing of 'who's watching the watchers' is exactly the right question, because right now the honest answer is almost no one. Flock markets itself as a private vendor, which conveniently lets a lot of these deployments dodge the kind of transparency and retention rules that would apply to a government-run camera system. Local police get a search tool; Flock gets a growing national map of vehicle movement; and residents get a camera on their corner they never approved and can't opt out of.
If this is news to you, it shouldn't be — and that's the point of projects like ours. Check our camera map to see what's already watching your own neighborhood, and head to our take-action page if you want to push back on a system that was built faster than anyone bothered to regulate it.
This is DeFlock The USA’s original commentary. The video above is the work of SecurityEvolution, published on YouTube — full credit to the creator.