Surveillance
A researcher pulled the locations of 300,000 Flock devices from the company's own records. Flock's response has been to try to get the map taken down.
Flock Safety told reporters this summer that it runs more than 120,000 cameras across the United States. That number was low.
A map published last week by security researcher Joshua Michael puts the count of Flock cameras above 170,000. Add the processing units, networking gear, and roughly 27,000 acoustic gunshot detectors that make the system work, and the total climbs past 300,000 devices. Michael's findings were cited at a Senate Judiciary subcommittee hearing on Flock the same day the map went live.
What makes the Flock Surveillance Map different from earlier efforts is where the data came from. Crowd-sourced projects like DeFlock rely on people spotting cameras and logging them by hand. Michael's map is built from a snapshot of Flock's own device records, which he archived in December 2025. The Intercept checked six random locations in Arizona against the map and found a Flock camera at every one.
How the data got out
In November 2025, Michael found that Flock's public website was handing out an access token to anyone who asked, no login required. That token worked against ArcGIS, the mapping platform Flock uses, and returned the coordinates of the company's devices.
He reported the problem to Flock on November 13. When nobody answered, he wrote again the next day, and again a few days after that. The third message got a short reply saying the company was triaging his findings and would follow up. According to Michael, it never did.
He downloaded the location data in December and published a technical write-up in January. The hole appears to have been closed after that. Around the same time, Flock put out a blog post stating flatly that it had never been hacked and had never suffered a data breach.
Michael sees only two ways to read that. Either Flock knew its device database had been pulled and chose to say nothing, or it had no idea it happened. The first is a transparency problem. The second means a company running a national tracking network couldn't detect someone walking off with its inventory.
What the map shows
Each device on the map is labeled by model, so you can tell a Falcon camera from a Picard processing unit. The searchable table lists each device's internal name as it appears in Flock's system, and those names say a lot.
One camera labeled as an FBI pilot unit sits at the J. Edgar Hoover Building in Washington. Another, at the Silverdale Detention Center in Chattanooga, Tennessee, carries a name indicating it covers a male holding area and showers. Near Chicago O'Hare, 860 devices are tied to the Rosemont Public Safety Department.
Michael argues the network is a national security risk in its own right. With a map like this, he says, a foreign government could:
"simply watch where our soldiers, federal agents, and politicians go."
Flock's answer so far has not been to dispute the map's accuracy. Instead, a firm called Doppel, acting on Flock's behalf, filed a trademark complaint asking for the site to be taken down, saying the use of the Flock Safety name could confuse customers. The site already displays a disclaimer stating it has no affiliation with Flock.
Privacy for me, not for you
Flock's core argument, repeated to city councils and police departments across the country, is simple: people have no reasonable expectation of privacy in public, so logging every passing license plate is fair game.
Its own crews don't seem to believe that. In a recent incident reported by InvestigateTV, a reporter wearing a yellow utility vest stood on a public street and filmed a Flock installer putting up cameras. The installer packed up his ladder, left, and called 911 to report that he was being harassed and followed. When police caught up with the reporter, they warned him that the installer had a right to privacy in a public place.
That is the exact right Flock tells everyone else they don't have.
The stakes go beyond hypocrisy. License plate readers make mistakes, and when they misread a single character, the consequences land on real people. There are documented cases of drivers pulled over at gunpoint and people jailed because a camera got one letter or digit wrong.
Where this gets decided
Flock contracts are mostly approved at the local level, by city councils and county boards, often with little public notice. That is also where they can be stopped. Some cities have already canceled or declined renewals after residents showed up to object.
The hard part is knowing when those votes happen. A nonprofit-run site, ALPRradar.com, now scans more than 2,000 municipal websites for agenda items mentioning license plate readers or Flock. Sign up with an email and zip code, and it sends an alert when a hearing is scheduled anywhere from 5 to 100 miles away. Volunteer moderators review each flagged agenda before alerts go out, since a keyword search for "flock" will also catch the occasional item about birds.
If you do run into an installer in your neighborhood, keep it calm. Stay at a legal distance, don't yell, and don't interfere. Taking photos in public is legal. It's also a reasonable way to remind the people building this network what it feels like to be on the other side of the lens.
Flock did not respond to The Intercept's request for comment.