Flock Cameras, Go 'Flock' Yourself

We are building an East Berlin-Style, Surveillance State in America, one camera at a time, and your city council is paying for it with YOUR money.

Gang stalking went high tech, the stalkers got badges, and grandma's walker doesn't outrun a drone. East Berlin never had it this good. If this article doesn't piss you off, check your pulse, you may be on life support.

It’s February in the Florida Keys and a Monroe County sheriff’s deputy named Lamar Roman is doing 70 on a two-lane bridge highway, passing a dump truck in a no-passing zone, then another, then swinging clear across the double yellow so a white pickup has to yank itself off the road to keep a family from dying on US 1. Lights on. Sirens on. Somewhere ahead is the fugitive he’s burning county gas to catch.

A 27-year-old actress he wanted to sleep with…

That’s the emergency?

He’d met her weeks earlier working security on the set of Bad Monkey, the Vince Vaughn show. She got off the extras bus, he whistled at her, and he kept circling all day until other extras were physically pulling her away from him. She said she had a boyfriend. His answer, preserved in his own arrest report, was “I need your name and number just in case I pull you over some day.”

She took it as a creepy joke. It was a project plan. He put her car on a camera watch list, and when the network spotted her weeks later, he nearly killed a truckload of strangers to run her down, pulled her over for nothing, and asked why she hadn’t followed him back on Instagram. “I told you I’d find you and pull you over.” Never logged the stop. He knew it was worth hiding.

Now here’s where you expect me to say the system failed. The system did not fail. Cameras photographed her car, a database served up her location, and a man with power used it on someone who couldn’t say no. That IS the system. Everything else is the sales brochure.

The network is called Flock, and it photographed you this week. So before we go one step further, you deserve to know exactly how big the thing that’s watching you actually is.

Brace yourself, because when I ran the numbers I had to scream at my motel room wall.

They Are Building East Berlin Here. That’s the Article. Everything Below Is the Receipts

The Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, kept files on a third of their own country. Doing it took 90,000 employees and a nation of informants ratting out their neighbors, and it stands as one of the most complete tyrannies ever constructed over human beings. My generation grew up being told that machine was the reason we were the good guys. We didn’t file our citizens.

Flock Safety files all of America with a sales team and a subscription plan.

Their own brag is 20 billion vehicle scans a month. More than 5,000 communities, 49 states, every scan stamped with time and place, stored 30 days, searchable from any cop’s laptop. And your town’s cameras are not your town’s cameras. Flock admitted to Senator Ron Wyden that 75 percent of its police customers joined something called the National Lookup Tool, meaning a deputy in Texas pulls a month of your movements in Pennsylvania without asking a soul in Pennsylvania. One login, one country, one file on everybody. The Stasi would have wept at the elegance.

And while that file gets fatter every day, our ruling class stares across the Pacific at China, where the cameras feed a social credit system that decides who boards a train and whose bank account works this week, and their reaction has not been horror. It’s been envy. Every piece of that machine is being assembled here, right now, in the open, and the license plate cameras going up on your street are its skeleton. That’s my thesis. Hold me to it.

But a thesis needs evidence, so let’s start with the question you should be asking. What happens when a machine like this gets pointed at one specific person somebody in power wants? We don’t have to guess. It’s already happened to American women dozens of times, and Deputy Roman up there was nowhere near the worst of them.

The Machine on Day One, With Amateurs at the Controls

The Institute for Justice, a civil liberties law firm, counts at least 24 officers caught using plate readers to stalk women they wanted or exes who got away, and those only surfaced because the victims felt hunted and forced the issue, since departments audit their Flock use about as often as I floss. Nobody catches these guys. The women catch them.

The police chief of Sedgwick, Kansas ran his ex-girlfriend and her new boyfriend through the system more than 200 times in four months. The chief. The man misconduct gets reported to.

A lieutenant in Kechi, Kansas tracked his estranged wife and texted her “You were spotted on Meridian.” She told detectives she’d started telling relatives where her kids were in case she came up missing or murdered. Her words, in the affidavit, about a man still wearing a badge while he hunted her.

An Orange City, Florida officer ran his ex’s plate 69 times, her mother’s 24, her father’s 15, and dropped an Apple AirTag tracking device in her wallet in case eighty thousand cameras lost her. His partner saw her plate photos on his screen and told him to cut it out. He said he knew. He kept going. That was the entire oversight apparatus. A coworker going “dude.”

In Joplin, Missouri, one officer ran one woman’s plate nearly 400 times. And Milwaukee takes the crown, because when an officer there allegedly tracked a woman and her ex over 170 times, the department assigned a 22-year veteran detective to investigate him, and prosecutors now say the detective spent that same stretch using Flock to stalk two victims of his own. One found a GPS tracker under their car. He logged his searches as “training.”

The man investigating the Flock stalker was a Flock stalker. And understand, these are the clumsy ones, the ones caught by their own girlfriends. Hand the same machine to people who are smart, patient, and salaried to make problems like you go away, and tell me how you’d ever find out.

Worse, you don’t even have to be somebody’s target. You can just be a database error, which is how a Colorado woman named Chrisanna Elser answered her door to a cop holding time-stamped Flock photos of her truck and a charge for stealing a package off a porch. She didn’t do it. Didn’t matter, the camera had spoken, and she spent weeks pulling footage from her own truck and a neighbor’s doorbell to prove she never stopped driving, doing his job for free under threat of a criminal record, before the charge quietly died. No apology came with it.

She got off easy. In Los Angeles, an audit found the LAPD tracked 161 people whose cars were falsely flagged as stolen, and a stolen-car stop means guns out, face on asphalt, kids screaming in the back seat, over a database burp. East Berlin at least needed an informant to lie about you. Here a server hiccup does it free of charge.

The LAPD actually walked away from its Flock contract this month, and not over those 161 human beings. They walked because the contract never answered a basic question. Who owns all this data? Sit with the fact that the police department didn’t know. Then follow me into the answer, because it’s where this story stops being about cops and starts being about the men above them.

Follow the Money Into the Black Box

On paper, Flock Group Inc. is a private company from the Atlanta suburbs, founded in 2017 with a cute origin story about three guys and a neighborhood burglar that they trot out at every council meeting. Nine years later it’s valued at $8.4 billion and clearing $300 million a year. CEO Garrett Langley says the mission is to eliminate crime. Not reduce. Eliminate. When a man promises to eliminate sin itself, hold your wallet and count your rights, because a mission like that has no natural stopping point. Every camera that fails to eliminate crime becomes the argument for the next camera.

Who funds a mission like that? The bluest blood in American tech money. Andreessen Horowitz led the $275 million round that vaulted Flock to $7.5 billion. Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund is on the ownership roster, with Tiger Global, Kleiner Perkins, Y Combinator, and the rest of the usual table.

And I want you to think hard about who Peter Thiel is. This is the man behind Palantir, the world-spanning data fusion system whose early money came partly from In-Q-Tel, the CIA’s own venture fund, a system now stitched through the Pentagon, ICE, and half the federal government.

You believe that crowd writes nine-figure checks to a camera company out of passion for recovering stolen Hyundais? These men build control systems. It’s the family business. The subscription fees are the storefront. The dragnet is the merchandise.

And when they soothe you that it’s all safely American owned, translate that correctly. Venture funds pass through money from limited partners who are legally allowed to stay anonymous. Sovereign wealth funds, foreign fortunes, whoever. The nameplates are American. The money behind the nameplates is a black box, by design, and nobody who tells you otherwise can see inside it either.

Fine, you say, but at least the data itself is locked up tight, right? A national tracking file this sensitive must be guarded like Fort Knox. I’m glad you asked, because a musician from the Atlanta suburbs decided to check.

His name is Benn Jordan, YouTuber, recording artist, and lately Flock’s most persistent migraine. Researchers working with him found Flock cameras streaming straight to the open internet, running software so old it stopped getting security updates in 2021, with 30 days of stored footage viewable, and in some cases deletable, by whoever strolled in. Police login credentials for the system were sitting for sale on the dark web. Beijing doesn’t need to buy this data. The password is taped to the monitor.

Now, you’d think a company caught in that state would grovel, patch, and thank the man. What actually happened next tells you more about Flock than everything above combined.

The Watchers Hate Being Watched

Jordan took his findings to the city council of Dunwoody, Georgia, in Flock’s own backyard, and demonstrated on the record how he got into the cameras. The council stalled the vote in February, stalled again in March, and then in April a resident stood up with public records showing a Flock employee had pulled up a live view of cameras inside the Marcus Jewish Community Center of Atlanta. The fitness center. The pool. The gymnastics room, where children practice. An employee of the crime-elimination company, watching kids’ gymnastics on the company system, discovered only because one man filed a records request.

Dunwoody renewed the contract anyway.

Then Tommy G took his turn. He’s the documentarian who’s filmed inside the Clayton County jail and gang territory in South Central, every place in America that hates cameras, and this year he pointed his lens at Flock itself. Two things happened. Filming the company that photographs 20 billion cars a month got police on him with a response time your average burglary victim can only dream about. And when he drove to the headquarters address Flock lists publicly, he found an empty building. Vacant. A decoy. The real offices are somewhere you’re not told, because the people logging your every pharmacy run have decided THEIR location is sensitive.

Twenty centuries of humans asking who watches the watchers, and our generation's answer is nobody, but we'll pay them monthly. The empty headquarters, the shut-down transparency sites, the "training" search logs, that's what no answer looks like in practice. Juvenal asked. Flock answered. Go flock yourself.

They know where your car sleeps. You’re not allowed to know where they work. And when citizens built HaveIBeenFlocked.com so ordinary people could check public records and see whether cops ran their plates, Flock reportedly went after it repeatedly, trying to get transparency tools shut down. Nothing to hide, nothing to fear, remember. Their line. It never once applies to them. In East Berlin the Stasi files were secret too, right up until the wall came down and Germans lined up around the block to read what their government had on them. Ask yourself what’s in your file. Then ask why you’re not allowed to know.

While you’re at it, ask the question that should have ended this company on day one. How is any of this legal? The Fourth Amendment exists. You have a constitutional right against exactly this. So how are they doing it? Through a loophole so stupid it circles back to brilliant, and once I show it to you, you will never unsee it.

The Fourth Amendment Has a Doggy Door

The Fourth Amendment forbids the GOVERNMENT from tracking you without a warrant. It says nothing about a private company, because the Founders never imagined a startup renting a national dragnet back to the police as a monthly service. So Flock, private company, owns the cameras and the data, and the government never “collects” anything, wink. A cop wanting a month of your life doesn’t visit a judge. He types your plate into a search box and fills in a little field marked “reason.” The ACLU of Massachusetts pulled the audit logs to see what officers actually write in that field before launching a warrantless national search of an American citizen. They write “investigation.” Several just typed “susp.”

Four letters between you and a coast-to-coast manhunt. Your warrant protection, two centuries of case law, bypassed by a text field nobody reads.

And once you’ve built a door nobody guards, you stop controlling who walks through it. Police logs showed Flock data flowing to ICE, including out of jurisdictions whose own laws forbid it, until public backlash forced Flock to flip a switch, which tells you the safeguard was always just a switch. Then Texas showed us the floor. A deputy ran a warrantless nationwide search across millions of drivers with the logged reason “had an abortion, search for female.” When the investigative outlet 404 Media caught it, the sheriff swore it was a welfare check, pure concern for a woman who might bleed to death. Then the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, pried the documents loose. Month-long death investigation. Prosecutors consulted about charging her. Detectives dispatched. They hunted a woman across state lines over her own pregnancy loss, got caught, and lied to the entire country about it.

Before you file that under somebody else’s politics, look closer, because the lesson isn’t about abortion. The lesson is that this machine doesn’t check your voter registration. It hunts whoever the person at the keyboard hates, and the keyboard changes hands every election. Whoever you are, somewhere out there is a future official who despises people exactly like you, and we are building his toolkit on a municipal payment plan.

Which raises the last question, the one this whole article has been walking toward. What does the finished toolkit look like? You don’t have to imagine it. There’s a country where it’s already running, and our tech lords have been taking notes.

The Finished Product Is Already Running. Ask Beijing

China wired itself with hundreds of millions of cameras feeding systems they actually named Skynet, after the machine that wipes out mankind in the Terminator movies, because apparently nobody in Beijing watched the ending. Welded to social credit, it works like this. Fall below the line, sue the wrong official, attend the wrong church, post the wrong sentence, and the apparatus quietly switches off your life. Tens of millions blacklisted from planes and trains. Bank accounts frozen without trial. A man who was a lawyer on Monday can’t buy a train ticket on Friday, and no human being anywhere had to sign anything or look him in the eye.

These are real people in China smiling about their social credit scores. Score high and life works. Score low and the trains, the loans, and your bank account stop working. No horror movie has ever scared me like this photo, because the monster in a horror movie doesn't hand out prizes for cheering it on.

Now bring it home, because every component is already on American soil. The cameras are Flock. The data fusion is Palantir. The chokepoint is the march to a cashless society, where cutting a man off from his own money is one field in one record. And the precedent for wiring American infrastructure to interests that never face an American voter got penciled in this year with Section 219 of the defense bill, which I covered last month, when Congress decided foreign access to our military systems was a feature.

Stack it all up and run the tape forward. You could have ten grand in the bank or ten million. One post the machine’s owners don’t like, one flag on one record, and your card stops working at the pharmacy, the grocery store, the gas pump. Nobody arrests you. Nothing so honest as an arrest. You’re just switched off, and you’ll spend months on hold hunting for a human being with the authority to switch you back on, and there isn’t one.

I promised this wouldn’t turn into a sermon, so take it as history instead. Two thousand years ago a prisoner exiled on a Greek island described a system where no man could buy or sell without the mark of the power that watched him, and for twenty centuries sophisticated people chuckled at the old mystic. The system is under construction. It has a sales team and a customer support line. (Chuckle accordingly.)

So that’s the machine, the money, the loophole, and the destination. If I’ve done my job you’re angry now, and the only remaining question is whether that anger can actually do anything.

It can, and it already is.

Get Mad Now, While Mad Still Works

This machine still has an off switch, and terrified local politicians are the switch. The LAPD just walked away from its Flock contract. Cities across Texas and California are shredding theirs. A lawsuit in Norfolk, Virginia argues the whole dragnet violates the Fourth Amendment, and Congressman Keith Self of Texas just filed a bill barring federal agencies from touching Flock data without a warrant. His whole argument fits in three words. Get a warrant.

So do the thing that’s already working. File a public records request for your town’s Flock audit logs. Take them to the council meeting and read the search reasons out loud, and watch “it’s only for stolen cars” die on contact with a log entry that says “susp.” Call your congressman and tell him to back the Self bill, in those three words if you like.

Ordinary furious residents holding receipts at a podium are killing these contracts every single month, and there is no lobbying budget on earth that beats them.

The East Germans had to tear their wall down with hand tools after forty years.

Yours is still on the loading dock. Cheaper to refuse delivery.

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And now the collection plate, which feels right for an article about a machine that knows what time you left church. Full disclosure, this piece was written by a man who gets around on an ebike, which I ride specifically because it has no plate and gives these cameras nothing to read. The journalist covering the largest vehicle-tracking network in American history is invisible to it, on principle and on pedals, while the company hides behind an empty lobby.

Somehow the guy on the bicycle has less to hide. No sponsor on earth is putting their logo under this headline, so it’s you or nobody.

A paid subscription keeps this reporting unbought, keeps Lily doing journalism with the degree she just earned instead of teaching canoe safety, and inches me toward the newsvan, which yes, gets a plate and enters the database the day I buy it. Fine. Let some analyst flag a vehicle whose registered purpose is hunting them back.

Help keep the Wise Wolf howling.

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Empathic Revolutionary is the reason this article exists. We got talking about these Flock systems last night and the conversation lit the fuse, so he’s got a byline on this one, fair is fair. He also made a music video about Flock cameras, and I’m putting it right here. If you’re into hip hop, you’ll love it. If you hate rap but still value FREEDOM, you’ll love it anyway. Watch it, then send it to somebody who thinks the cameras are for stolen cars.