Long-form reporting on how Flock cameras are used and misused.
37 posts
Flock's core rhetorical product isn't safety — it's fatalism. Every argument the company makes for its products reduces to "this was always going to happen, so the only question is configuration." Discourse in Cleveland is exposing why that argument doesn't hold.
A McHenry County, IL, cop was arrested for "official misconduct" for using Flock to stalk people. The behavior went unnoticed for months.
San Francisco figures out Flock has been improperly disseminating data for years. SFPD cracked the case all by themselves — it had nothing to do with a high school newspaper spelling it out for them a few weeks ago.
DPS awarded a federal grant on a certification of compliance that was never in place. When a complaint exposed the gap, DPS' grant bureau chief quietly handed the grant recipient the missing paperwork, while declaring the complaint "unfounded."
Flock's November 2024 drone demo showed exactly what its 2026 product page denies. The Supreme Court already ruled on this in 2001.
In this webinar, a Flock sales lead tells hospital customers to add fired and laid-off healthcare workers to the watchlist.
Flock claimed explicit permission to view cameras where children play. Dunwoody says no such permission exists.
Flock's CEO told a $12,500-a-seat TED audience that in South Africa, "crime is simply the cost of being alive." His own company is helping keep it that way.
Vumacam sells Flock surveillance in South Africa. Its founder was criminally investigated for operating unlicensed cameras. Its cameras have been called digital apartheid. It all tracks.
Procurement records reveal how Flock Safety sneaks its cameras into school zones with zero data governance provisions in the contract.
Flock Safety's three campaign promises — local control, no federal access, no employee access — are contradicted by Dunwoody PD audit logs, an FBI criminal complaint, and a Flock training video recorded on a live police account.
An unknown Flock-affiliated entity searched Dunwoody GA PD's camera networks 606 times in five months using AI-powered queries — many targeting political expression. Four other Flock-internal organizations also appear in the logs.
Flock customers technically 'own' their footage — but can't access high-resolution originals, get images with unreliable timestamps and scrubbed metadata, and must submit formal requests through Flock's own evidence platform just to obtain their own records.
Flock launched a half-finished Trust Center full of placeholder text and unvetted claims — an unintentional demonstration of the access control failures it was built to deny.
Flock's two-minute cinematic masterpiece appears to show real license plates with real hotlist entries broadcast on screen — and the address of an unidentified industrial building surrounded by Flock hardware.
An amendment strips warrant requirements and hands insurance companies access to a national surveillance database — with Iowa as the legal gateway.
Flock Safety's blog post about 'enhanced guardrails' is a confession dressed as a product announcement. The company admits it wasn't logging sharing configuration changes — a CJIS Security Policy violation — while its guardrails still leave tribal nations and private universities outside SB 34's reach.
A surveillance company and a surveillance-industry lobbyist walk onto a livestream.
Iowa's DOT has run nightly facial recognition scans on millions of driver's license photos for eighteen years. In the past four, the scans have led to 14 criminal charges and zero recorded convictions.
Iowa has highway safety standards. Kind of.
A TV ad, a recycled op-ed, and the quiet admission that guardrails don't actually work.
After three weeks of review, Cloudflare rejects Cyble's baseless takedown complaint—citing Flock's own admission that the data came from public records.
Flock claims it has "never been hacked." A fact-check of their January 2026 blog post reveals semantic games, undisclosed offshore contractors, and CJIS compliance failures.
A bug in Flock's system swept 257,806 cameras into an "ICE detainer" search. Flock claims no data was accessed—but California, Illinois, and Virginia prohibit such searches regardless.
Y Combinator funds both surveillance infrastructure and the machinery to silence its critics.
The third installment in this series on when a government contractor pays a company for "Takedown Services" to prevent transparency in government
The Fourth Amendment protects people, not places.
When a government contractor pays a company for "Takedown Services" to prevent transparency in government (Part II)
Evidence reveals Flock records police sessions and transmits raw data to foreign vendors, bypassing security controls. A complaint to Iowa DPS details active security incidents, the use of unvetted foreign contractors, and a software feature allowing users to unilaterally silently suppress NCIC alerts organization-wide.
When a government contractor pays a company for "Takedown Services" to prevent transparency in government
Flock's cameras have face detection triggers and use ReID technology to track people by appearance—treating humans like license plates.
Flock's security chief certified FBI compliance despite knowing their devices fail basic security requirements. Either they handle sensitive data illegally, or they lied.
Contractors in the Philippines are labeling faces and tracking vehicles through 80,000+ Flock cameras. Local police installed them; Flock ships the data overseas.
Despite Illinois' TRUST Act ban on immigration data sharing, ICE maintains backdoor access to Flock's database through RISS and local agencies.
How police used Flock's digital dragnet to investigate a homicide months after critical evidence was lost due to negligence.
A 157-page murder investigation file with informant details leaked to 200 agencies via Flock's uncontrolled audit log system.
Iowa DOT has a permitting process for roadside equipment. Kind of.
