Today, Explained - Flock cameras are watching you

Episode Date: August 18, 2026

Law enforcement agencies are using a vast network of AI-powered license plate cameras to track drivers. You may not have noticed them, but they have noticed you. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Kelli Wessinger, edited by Jolie Myers, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd and David Tatasciore, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. A Flock surveillance camera in a Lowe's parking lot in Lawnside, New Jersey. Photo by Hannah Beier/Bloomberg via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

People are big mad about data centers in the United States this summer, but don't sleep on how mad people are about flock. Flock cameras. If you haven't noticed them, don't worry, they've noticed you. You may have heard about them in your reels or on flock talk. I have never, in my life, been as pissed at the government as I am now that flock cameras exist. Americans are going to war against Flock AI surveillance cameras, and people are going around and literally sawing them down, absolutely destroying them. An AI surveillance apparatus goes against the very essence of freedom and the core values of our country. It's not right. It's not conservative. And it sure as hell ain't American. The flock surveillance cameras have popped up all over the nation every state but Alaska.

But this year, dozens of cities and counties across the country have cut ties with flock. And on today, explain from Vox, we're going to tell you why. Recommendations can be amazing. I mean, maybe someone recommended that TV show you've been obsessed with lately. But when it comes to home projects, it's different. If you don't like a show, you might lose a few minutes. If you hire a friend of a friend of a friend to fix a leaky ceiling, you could end up with a flooded kitchen.

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What the flock is flock, Drew? Yeah. Flock is like the cop's new favorite dream crime fighting tool. Safety isn't just a priority. It's a necessity. It is a license plate reader. Flock license plate reader cameras provide 24-7 protection. These are sticks on the side of the road that you've probably driven by a million times. But they're cameras, their AI cameras at the top of a pole, they scan every passing license plate into a database.

It can capture license plates and create a unique vehicle fingerprint, recognizing make, model, and key details with precision. And then it gives cops a way to search the location of any car they want to. And because there are 120,000 of these cameras across America, you can get a really, detailed map of where people go just by virtue of these cameras being everywhere. Help protect your neighborhood or business before crime happens. Now, reading about these cameras, Drew,

it feels like, you know, people are probably familiar with red light cameras, with speeding cameras that they get a little photo in the mail of themselves breaking the law, and they're like, oh, this sucks, not to pay this huge fee. But these sticks are pretty fancy. What is different about flock technology?

They are all about criminal investigation. Yeah, speeding and red light cameras only get you if you're speeding, or crossing a red light. But you can be completely innocent, suspected of nothing, and still go into this giant flock database. And flock is a private company. It's like beloved by these Silicon Valley investors. And they very quickly, you know, like within a decade, gotten all these relationships with 7,000 police departments across the country. And so the issue is that it takes pictures of everybody. It takes like videos, no matter whether it's, you know, heavy rain, middle of the night. It captures your

license plate into a database. Basically, everybody listening to this, if you are in the U.S., you are in a flock database somewhere. And the cops can use it at any point. Like, they can look up, you know, they can just put your plate in and see where you have gone. So we've seen a lot of cases of abuse of this, and it's a huge problem. And how long has this problem existed? I mean, how long have flock cameras been recording all of us driving around this country? Yeah, so flock's first camera was in 2017.

Before that, there were license plate readers, and they were, you know, they were on the sides of highways. They were even used for criminal investigations. But Flok came around and basically made it a household name. Like, they were very aggressive in sending salespeople out to police departments and city halls to really give the sales pitch that you can be, you know, state of the art, have the best cameras, get the most images. And so a lot of, you know, even small police departments, even, you know, neighbor. The neighborhood watches, HOA's, strip malls, school campuses are turning these things on so they can get as much data as possible. And is it working? Has it made the United States a safer, better place? So, Flock says yes. Flock says their cameras have been used in a million criminal investigations a year.

They're helping solve somewhere between 800,000 to a million crimes every calendar year. So roughly about 20 to 25% of all reported crime in America is being solved in some way or another with flock technology. They are always rolling out stories like positive anecdotes of bad guys who have been caught by cops who were using flock, you know, kidnappers, thieves, the worst of the worst. My son got kicked up, so I got off the car to pick up my son. He was sick and sleepy. You stole your car with the baby inside? Yes. Yeah, I got the child in the front of the phone.

And they say, you know, cops are able to use this and get this, like, superpower that they never had before because they really have, like, detailed location tracking of anybody. And so from their perspective, these are solving crimes. Anything bad that is related to them is worth the squeeze, basically, because of how much more cops are able to do now. And we all know that woke one was crazy, but what's wrong with giving cops superpowers? Yeah, so, yeah. A lot of good cops use these in a good way to catch the bad guys. As we have found in our reporting, there are a lot of bad cops who are using them in bad ways. And, you know, as you see with any surveillance tool, it is very alluring.

It's like the ring from Lord of the Rings. Like, once you get that power, some of these cops are going on to their phones in the middle of the night. They're getting drunk and they're looking up exes and their wives and their current girlfriends and their ex-girlfriends, new partners. and they're getting a ton of information about those women, mostly women, that they can use to stalk them. And we've seen cases where, like, very domestically controlling men are manipulating these women or sending them these menacing messages with information about, like, I saw you drive to this place,

I know you went here, why were you there? And it's really unnerving because, you know, the cops could have been abusive before, but now they have this extra weapon that the police departments have effectively given them through some Silicon Valley help that gives them that much more power to control and demean and manipulate. I mean, you said these cameras are basically all across the country. How widespread is the stalking is the abuse of flock footage?

So we did some reporting. We found at least 50 cases of cops who have misused this thing. Some have been charged. Some have been convicted and thrown in jail. 717 times. That's the amount of searches. Haynes City Police says Officer Christopher Goodson use these flock cameras across the city he was sworn to protect to keep virtual eyes on his ex-wife. A former Manashah police officer will serve six months in jail for using flock cameras to track a woman's car for personal reasons.

That story was a couple weeks ago. We've seen even more, like more than a dozen even since then. So the count is constantly going up. There are a lot of cops in this country, so it's not like a majority of cops are misusing this. but that's still dozens of cases where these women have been preyed upon, basically, by this tool. And these are just the ones we know about. Flock doesn't, like, aggressively go out and find cases. They don't report cases.

These are cases we had to basically find ourselves or through local media reports or through the police department's announcing them. Victims finding out this happened. So we don't even really know the size of the abuse, but we know that a lot of cops are doing this. And a lot of women are being, you know, preyed on in this way that they never expected, you know, when they got the relationship with these people to begin with. Is there like a specific story you can tell us about a woman who was stalked by her ex or current boyfriend cop? Yeah, so I spent time with a woman named Marcy Bakely.

She's this single mom in northern Georgia. She's an Air Force veteran. She dated the police chief of this small town called Brazelton in Georgia, had a good relationship, but then it turned sour. They broke up. And he started sending her these creepy messages. about why did you go to this place? He would text her about dates

and doctor's visits she would go to. She never understood how he even knew any of this stuff. She basically thought he had put a tractor on her car. And then one time he just told her like he had been using flock cameras on her. Horrifying. Yeah, and she was horrific. She didn't even know what flock was at the time.

You know, it later came out and through our reporting we were able to find out she was stalked by this guy more than 500 times. He put in the plate for her, for her teenage. daughter. He was getting, you know, he was searching tens of thousands of cameras for her, for her data. And the cop is ultimately investigated by the Georgia Bureau of Investigation. He was charged with license plate reader misuse. He was supposed to go to trial, but he committed suicide earlier this

year. Wow. And yeah, and he's just one of like many cases we have found. But in this case, you know, Marcy was like horrified because to understand that you were being watched this whole time, that you had no idea. And for it to be a cop doing it, you know, she really felt like powerless. Like, who am I supposed to report this into? Like, who am I going to call if it's chief of police? How easy is it for a police officer to just search flock records for anything they want? If a buddy of theirs says, hey, you know, this guy flipped me off last night on the highway,

here's his license plate, find out what his name is where he lives. just do that? Is the system that ripe for abuse? Yes. I mean, Flock says, you know, they install, they suggest all of these rules, they create these training guides, they only want it to be used for legitimate criminal investigations. But they also say they don't want to police the police. They want the departments to basically set their own rules. And, you know, from the flock and police department perspective, they say, you know, these are often cases where time is of the essence. If somebody's just been kidnapped, we really need to find them, so we need to be able to search for them immediately. But you can also see how that leads to abuse because it can just

take one bad copness using the tool in the dead of night or when they're feeling, you know, desperate or drunk or whatever. And you see kind of how this abuse happens. What does Flock have to say about this level of abuse of their technology? Yeah, so Flock's answer to this is kind of interesting. I mean, they say, obviously they think any abuse is horrible. They, they They are creating these tools. They call these audit logs that record every search, and they offer them to the police departments. So the police departments can check the abuse. But they also basically say, like, this is going to happen.

They say they can't control human nature. Bad cops are going to do bad cop stuff. And so their argument is like, don't throw out the baby with the bathwater. Think of the positives. But I think, you know, the reality of it is that these women are really being abused. And they're just, you know, the knife's edge of these problems. If we're all being surveilled in this way, you can imagine how bad this really could get. Flock around and find out when today's explained returns.

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Just head to granola.a-a-i-slash-explained. That's granola.a-i-slash-explained to get your time back. Get three months free at granola. orgia.com. Today, Explain is back. Drew Harwell from The Washington Post is gone, but don't worry because Jason Kebler from 404 Media is here to tell us more about how Flock is being used and abused.

Yeah, so I've been replaced. We're reporting on Flock for a few years now, and there's been several high-profile cases and trends that we've been reporting on. Last year, we learned that local police were helping ICE surveil undocumented immigrants using the Flock network. A recent report found that more than 15,000 searches may have been linked to immigration enforcement activity. Last summer, the non-profit newsroom, CalMatters, found that LAPD and other sites, Southern California law enforcement agencies broke the law by illegally sharing automated license plate reader data with feds more than 100 times in a one-month period alone. There was also a case in Texas where a woman's partner reported that she had a self-administered

abortion and more than 80,000 cameras across the entire country were searched for that woman. Last week, we received disturbing news that police in Texas illegally accessed data from automatic license plate readers used throughout Illinois. They did so to track down a woman regarding an abortion care related matter. The problem here is that if they went for an abortion-related case, they will go for absolutely anything. And that is what worries me, right? Which is, you know, what is it going to be tomorrow? So this isn't just cops and their domestic relationships or former relationships.

This is ICE, this is abortion, this is invasive, is the long and short of it. How are people responding to this new era of surveillance that no one signed up for? People are really mad about it. Look off our campus now! Look up our campus now! And I feel this violates my right to privacy. Mass surveillance is what is going on. And in my opinion, it has nothing to do with politics.

It's about safety. And I think that there's a lot of privacy. There are a lot of communities that signed on to this technology because they thought it would primarily be used to recover stolen vehicles or to find missing children, maybe for property crimes, things like that. And what we've seen is a real mission creep. And people are really mad about it. They think that this is the surveillance state. And so there's been a political backlash to it and there's also been a vigilante backlash to it. Tell me about the vigilante backlash first.

It sounds more fun. Yeah. The vigilante backlash is very crazy in that basically people are putting masks on and they are cutting flock cameras down. These videos have racked up millions of views showing a man damaging flock cameras in Minnesota. These are mounted on poles, and so they are basically buying pole saws and they're cutting the poles down. This is a flock camera and some terrorists believe that these infringe on our liberties. I'm not here to comment on that, but I'm here to show you guys the most efficient way to cut aluminum pipe. Hey, I'm replacing this flock cam with the American flag.

This one's for the moon. In some cases, flock cameras have been shot with shotguns. Police in the town of Bukwantago believe someone shot a street sensor with a shotgun, thinking it was a flock camera. Tonight, a candidate for Congress in East Tennessee is sitting in a blunt county jail. He is accused of shooting four flock cameras around that county. I've seen cases where this like industrial foam has been sprayed on the lens of flock cameras. A pair of flock cameras sprayed, covered, and compromised.

It appears to be covered in a foam sillet. I also got an email from a man who was arrested for what he said was changing the angle of a flock camera. And what he meant by that is he drove his truck into the pole of a flock camera and had it like faced the sky. All I did was change the angle with my truck. truck. Yeah, he was like I made it, you know, not able to surveil people. Now it's surveilling the sky. There's something called D-Flock, which is a crowdsourced map to track all of the flock cameras in the United States. And this map has become incredibly popular. And so what we're seeing are people forming these groups to talk at city council meetings to determine, like, is this a technology

that we want in our town. Get the flock out of Troy. Thank you very much. We are asking for the flock contract to be terminated in full. Your community is telling you that we don't want this. I think we should completely remove them.

The political spectrum of the backlash here is everything you can possibly imagine. You know, there have been towns in Silicon Valley that have banned flock cameras. There was a town in Texas called Bandera that is like a wild west. tourist tourism town that banned flock cameras. And so this is happening across the political spectrum.

Conservatives will say this is invasive government, this is Big Brother, don't surveil me, I don't want you seeing where I drive my car or my truck. The left is saying much the same thing, but they're saying this is being used to surveil black and brown people. It could be used to surveil women seeking abortions. It could be and has been used to surveil undocumented

immigrants. And so the backlash is coming from all angles at this point. So this is many, many towns. There have been dozens that have canceled their contracts. Los Angeles allowed its contract with flock to lapse. Denver canceled its contract with flock. And so some of these have been quite large cities. And then you've also seen pretty small towns cancel their contracts as well. I mean, this is a billion dollar company, multiple billions of dollars. it's worth, they don't want to remove cameras. They want to install more cameras. Are they doing anything meaningful to address the concerns of people who might want to throw a bag on top of one of these cameras?

Or change the angle of one of these cameras with their truck? The backlash has been so strenuous that Flock has started to say that it will proactively flag anomalous searches. We introduced a new tool. called audit assistance, which detects abnormal activity and flags it for review by the ALPR administrator. So if like a police officer searching the same license plate over and over again, it might automatically flag an audit for the police department to see like, hey, is this police officer abusing the system? They also are changing the default retention time from 30 days to seven days. That means that every image our cameras capture is by default purged from the customer's

database after one week unless it becomes evidence in an active criminal investigation, in which case it enters evidence mode and is retained as the law requires. Organizations like the American Civil Liberties Union say that these are like window dressing, that these changes are not super meaningful and that the main requirement that most people are asking for would be a requirement for police to get a warrant before they search the system, which would take these searches from being like extremely routine. I think it's very important to stress that there are hundreds of thousands of searches

done on this system every single month to something that, you know, maybe there would be a higher bar where a judge has signed off, like, this is a crime that warrants this type of search. If flock goes down or if the backlash grows to the point where they're at least, you know, far less relevant in this field, are there just like a... a dozen other companies doing the same thing, ready to take its place? This technology is really old. It's been around for decades.

And what Flock has done is networked it and added AI to it. But there are other companies that offer similar technology. Motorola is in many cities in the United States. They make similar tech. AXON, which makes Taser and body cameras and cameras for police cruisers, also has an ALPR product. And some of the cities that have ditched flock have actually. just replaced it with an axon contract,

meaning they've ditched one surveillance vendor and they've added a different one. I don't know that surveillance cameras and automated license play readers are ever going to fully go away, but I don't think it's clear that flock itself is going to survive this backlash. I think that they are a very popular company with police and with cities,

but the backlash is so strong that I think that, I think that the company is worried. We can see it sort of in how their CEO, Garrett Langley, has been talking about the tech. And a year ago, he was calling journalists who covered the company activists, and he was calling activists who protested the company terrorists. And then unfortunately, there's terroristic organizations, like Deflock, whose primary motivation is chaos.

They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else. And he's had to apologize for that rhetoric. he's had to go and say, you know, we are not Big Brother, we are trying to improve your communities, this sort of thing. And they're really on like a PR tour right now to clean up their image. I don't know where this goes from here, but I haven't seen much fatigue from the public on this story. It's like that I opened my Instagram feed and I'm just inundated with video after video that has millions and millions of views about flock. Like, this seems to be something that has really captured the public's attention and that they really seem to care about.

We reached out to Flock for comment on the show today, but only got an out-of-office that said, our media team is currently touching grass and taking a break. Unlike our cameras, we can't work 24-7. So we'll get back to you when we've had a snack and regain the ability to form coherent sentences. Ivy Shy Artsy and Kelly Wessinger made. the show today, Jolly Myers edited, Patrick Boyd and David Tadishore Mix.

Gabriel Donatov, check the facts. I'm Sean Ramos, Firmitz, today explained.