Flock has issued a legal demand to shut down a public map exposing its surveillance network

Our Take

Credit to Cybernews for surfacing this: a researcher named Joshua Michael built a public map of Flock Safety cameras using location data he found sitting on unauthenticated endpoints, and Flock's response wasn't to fix its own security — it was to send lawyers after the guy who exposed it. That's the tell. A company that puts thousands of license-plate cameras on American streets, feeding a searchable database shared with police nationwide, apparently thinks the public has no right to know where those cameras are. Information security failures should never be solved by silencing the person who found them.

This is exactly the dynamic we built DeFlock The USA to push back on. Flock operates largely in the shadows — quiet city council votes, vague 'public safety' press releases, and now, legal intimidation when someone tries to shine a light on the hardware itself. If a hobbyist researcher can pull camera locations from an unsecured feed, that raises its own questions about how carefully this surveillance infrastructure is actually being protected, let alone governed.

Mapping these systems isn't an attack on public safety, it's basic accountability for a network most residents never voted on and can't opt out of. Check our own camera map to see what's been documented in your area, and if you want to push back locally, our take-action page has concrete steps for getting ALPRs in front of your city council instead of leaving it to legal threats and silence.