Are you getting Flocked? 49 states, over 120,000 license plates read, 6,000 law enforcement agencies staffed by tens of thousands of personnel, over 1,000 private customers, and some of those private customers are giant international corporations. There is the possibility they can infiltrate the dash cams of Uber and Lyft drivers with hundreds of thousands of cameras.
But it doesn’t stop there. The company is hoping to unleash drones, surveillance trailers, and gunshot-detecting hardware, and it looks like the Alphabet agencies are licking their lips, struggling to get their greasy hands on all your data!
All this is being done by a company pocketing $500,000,000.00 per month!
What could go wrong?
The company behind all this, Flock Safety, insists this is not surveillance in the Orwellian sense. Its CEO has repeatedly said the technology exists to protect the public, solve crimes, locate missing people, and make communities safer.
“We’re not Big Brother,” the message goes. The watching, we are told, is for our own good.
Question: Does this sound like “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help!”
Officials and company leaders point to cases solved and people found. In a society tired of feeling vulnerable, the trade-off can sound reasonable: a bit less anonymity in public spaces in exchange for greater security.
Yet the same systems that deliver those results also create a persistent, searchable record of movement. Cameras do not only activate when a crime is reported. They operate continuously. Data is collected, retained for a period, and made available to subscribing law enforcement agencies. Even with shorter default retention times and new safeguards announced after reports of misuse, the infrastructure remains. The network is national in scope. Once the data exists, the risk of access—authorized or not—follows.
Recent controversies have exposed the gap between the safety narrative and lived experience. Reports of officers using the system for purposes far removed from public safety have included alleged stalking, forced public apologies, and policy adjustments. Critics who mapped Flock Safety camera locations or questioned the scope of data sharing were at times dismissed in strong terms before softer language took their place. The pattern is familiar: technology is introduced as a targeted tool, expands rapidly, faces backlash, then receives incremental reforms while the core capability stays in place.
This is how privacy erodes in practice. It rarely arrives as a single dramatic overreach. It arrives as successive layers of justification.
- Each camera is justified by local crime statistics.
- Each data-sharing arrangement is framed as inter-agency cooperation.
- Each retention policy is presented as a balance between investigation needs and civil liberties.
Over time, the cumulative effect is a society in which ordinary movement is routinely logged, and the burden shifts onto individuals to prove why that logging should stop.
Safety and privacy are not inherently enemies. A society can invest in policing, community programs, and targeted investigations without building a near-permanent record of who drove where and when. The current trajectory treats continuous observation as the default and privacy as the exception that must be defended.
The harder conversation—about scale, accountability, mission creep, and the long-term consequences of normalizing mass location tracking—gets deferred.
The Flock Safety cameras keep running. The data keeps accumulating. Officials and executives continue to insist that the misunderstanding lies with those who worry. Are you tired of being ‘Flocked’ (compliments of Flock Safety)
Meanwhile, your private life grows smaller, one justified camera at a time.
Please add your comments about being Flocked in the section below.
Replies
If you are not doing anything against the law, you should not have to worry about the cameras, right?
I think the issue here is the creeping invasion of our privacy.
For example, if you're not doing anything illegal in your home, why should you worry? Just ignore the camera in the bathroom!
My family escaped Nazi Germany, where it became legal to kill fellow citizens if they didn't comply with the 'law'....it was legal!
Wow, Steve. You have a story to tell...
Then you wouldn't mind one in your home, either, right? My point is aggression increases. Spying (and tracking and tracing and stalking) is an action of control and/or power. Power escalates. LIke a fire, it's got to be put out or it escalates. No different from a bully who won't and can't be stopped. Like mass murderers begin with innocent animals. Not same, but that's the idea.
In common law, anyone else's rights end at my face. Also not the same, but similar, from a different perspective. And, if I have no right to give or deny permission, then I have no rights.
This all began with the passage of the Patriot Act during President George W. Bush after the attacks of 9/11/01. If we want the government out of our business then we must ALL take responsibility for our lives, our livelihood, our medical care, and put an end to all of the socialist programs like the 88+ means tested wefare programs, Social Security, and Medicare. There was a time when Americans was synonymous with "Rugged Individualism" and taking anything from the government was an embarrassment. The next time there is a terrorist attack, rampant crime waves, or a natural disaster, We the People need to take care of the situation and tell the Government to stay out of the way! This is the ONLY way to put all of this Big Brother, Nanny State to an end in America!
Amen to that, Col.
Yo Steve, great article now I'm inspired to start mooning all the traffic cameras. If they want to watch then they get to see my A$$!
You mean like this?
I think you look better that way! Hahahaha!
https://ohiocapitaljournal.com/2026/07/08/are-flock-cameras-next-su...
"The U.S. Supreme Court’s decision restricting law enforcement’s ability to use sprawling cell phone location data is bringing to light questions about the legitimacy of Flock Safety cameras used by police in Ohio and elsewhere."
This surveillance state must end once and for all.
Agreed