Excerpts from “What the Flock is that?” zine
Flock Safety is a company that traffics in surveillance technology, infrastructure, and data. Their main operations involve installing automated license plate readers (ALPRs) along roadways at major intersections in order to collect images and data about passing cars.
Flock’s technology is a new kind of mass-surveillance infrastructure: their product is searchable data logs about our movements. This constant monitoring can deter people from exercising their freedoms, like attending protests or engaging in other forms of free expression.
Flock uses artificial intelligence to manage, sort, and search data, and sell access to the data to police departments on a subscription basis. They started out selling their cameras to homeowners’ associations, and later expanded to selling them to police departments. Flock claims to be successfully surveilling 70% of the U.S. population. As of 2025, Flock claims to operate in over 5,000 communities across 49 U.S. States, and perform over 20 billion scans of vehicles every month.
Flock’s cameras have a distinct look, and once you know what to look for, you’ll start seeing them everywhere. The cameras are all black with a black solar panel. They’re mounted on either a stoplight, streetlight, or a standalone black metal pole. The cameras take photos of every car that passes, recording the license plate number, time, date, and location.
Flock’s cameras aren’t just license plate reader cameras — they use Al to create a “unique vehicle fingerprint” based on scratches, dents, aftermarket add-ons, bumper stickers, and many other metrics. When you drive past one of these cameras, Flock takes in all this data to track your movements in the database, which is stored for 30-90 days.
The Flock network is widely available and susceptible to misuse. It is accessible to subscribing police departments across the country, major government agencies such as the ATF, DHS, FBI and ICE, private entities such as homeowners’ associations, and the Home Depot Corporation. The databases are also accessible to anyone with whom a user unlawfully shares their login credentials with, which is documented as happening.
Flock has positioned themselves in communities so quickly because they solicit subscriptions from police departments directly. Most departments add Flock services to their budgets without stopping to ask the community if they want those services, or making any effort to prove a need for them. Flock tells small-town police that their services will rapidly solve crime, and even stop crime before it happens. There is no data to support this claim.
Mass surveillance of vehicles through the Flock network circumvents traditional warrant processes: police can look up all movements of any license plate at will, at an unprecedented scale, with no oversight on probable cause. There is little to no oversight on how police search Flock’s database.
Flock’s strategy is currently working so well for them because people are kept in the dark about what is going on. But many communities across the country have fought Flock and won simply by raising awareness and starting a public conversation. Austin TX, Denver CO, Eugene OR, Oak Park and Evanston IL, and Sedona AZ have all cancelled their contracts with Flock after community campaigns. With a little bit of work, you could achieve the same in your city or county.
Safety isn’t found in surveillance. Meet your neighbors, watch their cats while they’re away, and ask for that cup of sugar. We can keep each other safe!
RESOURCES
• “How to Pump the Brakes on Your Police Department’s Use of Flock’s Mass Surveillance License Plate Readers” from ACLU. aclu.org
• “Street Level Surveillance” at the Electronic Frontier Foundation:
sls.eff.org/technologies/automated-license-plate-readers-alprs
• The Deflock Project: deflock.org has basic info and an ALPR map showing many documented ALPRs across the U.S. and elsewhere in the world.